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by: Donald E. Westlake
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780670411320
ISBN: 0670411329
Label: Viking Adult
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 458
Publication Date: March 15, 1982
Publisher: Viking Adult
Sales Rank: 2495570
Studio: Viking Adult
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A mile-long, rusty freight train with a cargo of coffee becomes an important target of some of the world's most unscrupulous mercenaries and thieves, who plot to take over the international coffee market. Reprint. NYT.
Amazon.com Review:
This 1981 Westlake gem is back in print. A mile-long freight train steams through the heart of Idi Amin's mad, tortured, magical, and corrupt Uganda, loaded down with kahawa (Swahili for coffee). What Amin doesn't know, what his most beautiful spy has not been able to wring out of her latest victim, and what the world's coffee markets may be unable to swallow, is that the train and six million dollars worth of coffee are about to disappear into the hands of a conflicted, colorful, swashbuckling band of mercenaries and moneymakers.
'Kahawa is such a splendid huggermugger that if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you.... No reader that I will ever want to meet should dare complain.' --The New York Times
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Contents:
For Lew Brady and Frank Lanigan, veteran mercenaries of several sides of half a dozen African wars, it was their last chance to make a big score on the Dark Continent. For Baron Chase, a special anti-smuggling adviser to Idi Amin, it was to be his Swiss retirement fund, set up before Amin's inevitable fall from his excesses and brutalities. For Mazar Balim and his son, Asian exiles from Uganda living in Kenya, it was a chance to give Amin a real black eye while making a fortune. It was a mile long ... Read More
Rating: - Much Ado About....coffee. But good read!
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Fantastic
Understand that this book is a major departure for Westlake, and is darker tham a lot of his other books. This is a good thing, I've read a few of his other books, and while they were ok, Kahawa is simply woderful. By blending some actual figures into the book, Westlake adds realism, which makes it even more gripping. Worth more than 5 stars!
Rating:  - Best Westlake ever
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.
Rating: - Read long ago, but not forgotten
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?
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