On The Road was a series of picaresque journeys across the United States, finally ending up in a paradise village in Mexico, with Kerouac being handed the ultimate desideratum, a huge fat rolled joint. The Devil's Cup is a similar joyous journey.

In someone else's hands, this would be just another a flapjaw story --- a book concocted by an agent to sell off to a conglomerate publisher to cater to the Feeble Travel Tale addict, nodding off in his armchair. Instead, this has to be the cat's pajamas of all travel sagas -- ralphmag.com - Lolita Lark

An adrenaline-filled book.. Traveling by train, dhow, rickshaw, cargo freighter and donkey, Allen follows the trail coffee took as it spread around the planet. Along the way he offers a running commentary on (and makes an intriguing case for) 19th century French historial Jules Michelet's theory that Europes transformation into a coffee-drinking society led to the birth of enlightened Western civilization. Allen takes everything in stride and he has the rare ability to capture his characters' unsavoriness without denigrating them. The Devil's Cup coveys a surprisingly thorough history of coffee in an entertaining package that no one could mistake for a textbook. -- Salon.com - Richard Renolds

In The Devil's Cup, Stewart Lee Allen has penned a very entertaining travelogue of his experiences in Calcutta, Vienna, Paris, Rio and other cosmopolitan locales searching for the origins and mythos behind the black liquid that binds all people: coffee. Allen's prose style is pretty hopped-up; he writes like someone who's willing to sneak into war zones or disguise himeself as a Muslim in order to get another cup...which is exactly what he is. Between escapades, he more than justifies his book's mock-portentous subtitle by providing us with delicious historical tidbits, most of which underscore Western culture's inability to rationalize the ineluctable need for caffeine with the ineffable sense that anything this powerful must be slowly killing us. Stewart Lee Allen's engaging voice and deadpan observations make this book truly enjoyable. -- Forbes FYI

It sounds absurd but Allen's The Devil's Cup posits the coffee bean as "the driving force in history." The Devil's Cup, however, is strangely substantial (and) written in a style recalling the best travel writing. The hidden connections Allen uncovers in this book often astound, making it, in its way, a small treasure. -- BookForum - Ronald Jones