Kahawa

Overall, KAHAWA, is an uneven yet action-packed adventure with something for everyone: sex, adventure, a really evil villain, manly heroes and beautiful courageous heroines of all colors. Our mercenary heroes are striking a blow against tyranny, but they aren't looking for the Ark, or the Grail or King Solomon's Mines. They're stealing coffee. But that's what's kinda cool about it. The premise, that a mixed bag of mercenaries, for profit and for politics, decide to hijack Idi Amin's coffee train, worth six million dollars, is very inventive. Westlake allows his characters to be heroic for monetary reasons and for ideology: Idi Amin's a tyrant and all want to see him go down....and making a buck or two from his downfall will make it all the sweeter.

This book is a total departure for Donald Westlake and one for the better. While the plot deals with the theft of a train load of coffee, the book is so far beyond an average hiest story that it is hard to catagorize. The setting, the characters - even the steamy sex scenes - are more than one expects after reading Westlake's other books. This is, in many ways, a serious novel, but at the same time, very entertaining. I had to read it in one long session. It was that gripping.

As I remembered the novel, it was the best I ever read. My rating may have been coloured by my living in Liberia 15 years ago when reading the book. Samuel K. Doe was at the time turning our life upside down (I later lived for some years in Tanzania, bordering lake Victoria). The book is totally different from anything else that I have read from Westlake. Did I find it good if I'm searching for it 15 years later?

You don't read adventures. I don't read adventures. Kahawa is an adventure book worth reading. Kahawa is a well-researched, gloriously well written, carefully characterized adventure novel about a plot to steal a train of freshly harvested coffee from 1970s Uganda. 1970s Uganda and Idi Amin, who is prominently featured in the novel. Kahawa is filled with historical (true!) anecdotes about early Africa, and is set in an accurate portrayal of the horror of Amin's brutal Ugandan dictatorship (which to most people today is just a memory). It's main characters are real people -- not the supermen and fearless heroes found in most adventure novels. And best of all, Westlike writes the story with a touch of humor and wit, giving the reader a look at the stark reality of Uganda, Africa, racism, and piracy while at the same time keeping the reader comfortable with the deeds of the main characters, and hopeful that they will be successful