Book excerpt: A People's History of Coffee and Cafes is an exploration of how a certain plant became a global commodity, creating fortunes and despair, bringing people together and tearing them apart, playing a staring role in the remarkable awakening of our modern world. The theme is coffee; the venue is the coffeehouse - one of the few places where prince and pauper might meet on equal footing. But where did coffee come from? And how did it get to us? For in the course of a single generation, coffee burst onto the European scene like an Arabian Sirocco without the trumpeting of the media, as we know it, paving the way for a new and wonderful product. Bob Biderman is the founding editor of Cafe Magazine. He has been researching the social history of coffee and cafes since the early 1960s when, as a student at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, he experienced the first wave of the American espresso revolution. During the 1980s and 90s, he went on to write about the coffee cultures in Paris, Amsterdam and London for various magazines and newspapers. Bob has worked as a writer and lecturer with specific interest in the nature of cities. He is the editor of a series of historical novels focusing on 19th century London and has written numerous books published by Pluto, Walker, Gollancz and Hachette