Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture » (Bargain)

Taylor Clark is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a Pacific Northwest native. He is a contributing writer and former staff writer for Portand, Oregon's acclaimed alternative weekly Willamette Week

Part Fast Food Nation, part Bobos in Paradise, STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.

In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.

"Starbucked is ...smart cultural criticism minus any academic gobbledygook. Mr. Clark is quite funny as he dryly sends up the excess of the corporate behemoth, and Starbucked is an entertaining, highly readable book....Full of cocktail-party-worthy tidbits." —Adelle Waldman, New York Observer

The New York Times - P. J. O'Rourke

As a key to the secret of Starbucks, Starbucked is a failure—a failure that we should all buy and read. Because in Part 2 of his opus, Clark turns from trying to explain why Starbucks is successful to trying to judge whether Starbucks is a monster of capitalist rapine. And we are treated to astonishing examples of open-minded intellectual honesty, arguments from evidence and cleareyed reporting.