On Tuesday, June 10, Dean Cycon will read from his recently published memoir Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee. Javatrekker explores Cycon's adventures throughout the world, while “advancing the well-being of coffee growers by involving them in fair trade arrangements that bring them greater profit, respect, and control over their lives.”

A graduate of Williams College, Cycon avows that in each cup of coffee major issues of the twenty-first century - globalization, immigration, women’s rights, pollution, indigenous rights, and self-determination - are played out in villages and remote areas around the world. Javatrekker is a unique hybrid of Fair Trade business, adventure travel, and cultural anthropology. In the book, readers are brought face-to-face with real people who make our morning coffee ritual possible.

Second in economic value only to oil, the coffee trade is complex with several levels of middlemen between the consumer and the 28 million growers in fifty distant countries. Part entrepreneur, part activist, part mischievous explorer, Cycon has traveled extensively throughout the world’s tropical coffee lands, and in his book reveals places and people few outsiders have ever seen. Included are Colombia, where holy men believe they are literally holding the world together despite the severe effects of climate change caused by us, their “younger brothers”; Ethiopia, where many believe that coffee was first discovered 1,500 years ago; and Mexico, where the infamous Death Train transported immigrants from Central America to the U.S. border with a horrifying toll in lost lives and limbs.

Rich with stories of people, landscapes, and customs, Cycon's Javatrekker offers a deep appreciation and understanding of the global trade and culture of coffee.

Through his company, Cycon has funded a revolving loan fund to dig wells in Ethiopia, a coffee roaster/café in Nicaragua that is owned and operated by a prosthetics clinic which provides limbs and therapy to landmine victims, reforestation in Peru, and coffee de-pulping machines in Papua, New Guinea. To learn more about Dean's Beans visit www.deansbeans.com Javatrekker, awarded the Independent Publisher's Association's Gold Medal for the best travel book of the year, comes recommended by Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu and actress Susan Sarandon.

Books for the series are available at the museum's gift shop and at the Bennington Bookshop, and bookstores in Williamstown and Manchester. Watch for information on the remaining presentations.