|
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Gates Gill
Publisher: Gotham
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
Buy Used: $6.99
You Save: $16.01 (70%)
New (41) Used (34) Collectible (1) from $6.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  91 reviews
Sales Rank: 4562
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 1592402860
Dewey Decimal Number: 647.95092
EAN: 9781592402861
ASIN: 1592402860
Publication Date: September 20, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: average to moderate shelf wear; very readable copy
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.
One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxurya lattebrooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties hed ever faced, were running circles around him.
The other baristas treated Gill with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michaels kids, liked a lot better.
The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal and Mikes friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 86 more reviews...
 Benighted Errant May 13, 2008
First, the answer to the burning question enquiring minds will doubtless want to know: No, it turns out that Michael Gates Gill no longer works at the same Starbucks on 93rd Street & Broadway that he wrote about in his memoir. Mr. Gill no longer needs to, you see; his book having been optioned by none other than two-time Academy Award winning actor Tom Hanks, who's in fact fifteen years the author's junior. One may admire Mike--or as Ernest Hemingway referred to him when they shared mojitos in Pamplona in 1959, "Miguel"--for having turned his life around so spectacularly, by making not only all those alpacinos, but also lemonade out of the lemons he'd been dealt. But just because one may admire Mr. Gill for that, doesn't mean one should. This slight memoir of having gone from being El Exigente to a lowly ten-buck-an-hour barrista at a Starbucks--entitled, with only skim irony, "How Starbucks Saved My Life"--is insipid; filled with the sort of hard-won wisdom most of us have learned by the time we're half its protagonist's age, even if we didn't happen to leave Yale eighteen credits shy of an undergraduate degree.
As they no doubt never said in the Gill household, "Oy!"
On the audiobook I retrieved from a bargain bin at a large retail chain also famous for offering its worker bees second chances, narrator Dylan Baker did his best to emulate a shot of espresso and keep the listener awake. Still, I'd be lying if I pretended that I didn't have the urge several times to turn the recording off. That's not so much because Mr. Gill's story is boring, as because from early on it seemed to me that his come-uppance was more karmic retribution than the Dickensian parable advertised; nothing more, really, than a mercifully slight exhortation to remember the words of the sage Howard Schultz by treating everyone you meet with dignity and respect, evinced in a willingness to let them use the toilet. Indeed, while the author can be at times quite self-deprecating--as for instance when he writes about having lacked any athletic prowess as a child; how he's always been math phobic; how he couldn't read until he was ten years old, or has always been, in his own words, "an inveterate coward"--he conveniently glosses over in but a few pages his most glaring screw-up to date; viz., how his thirty-year marriage to the mother of his four eldest children fell apart after he fathered his youngest son with a fortysomething woman he met in a gym. Inveterate coward, indeed!
Most of "How Starbucks Saved My Life", when it isn't alternately filled with shameless name-dropping of Papa, Jackie Kennedy, or John Updike--said by Mr. Gill's famous father Brendan to possess "the silkiest hair of all God's creatures"--centers around the eponymous chain, and how the author came to espouse its basic tenets. That's really too bad, considering that most, if not all, of the insights this self-styled Siddartha shares are just, well, nonsense. For example, only a WASP with a lot of white guilt would aver to thinking it a good thing, when superiors ask their subordinates to do them "favors", as opposed merely to ordering them to perform tasks. Forgive me my naivete, but I always thought that a favor is something done at the discretion of the person doing it. If the choice, then, is to do as one is told by The Man or be fired for insubordination, seems to me that the only person being done a favor is oneself, as one's conscience entreats, "Hey, do us a favor here--try not to screw this one up too badly?" Similarly, as has been noted by many about the nonsensical way in which Starbucks refers to its customers as "guests". . .well, um, guests don't pay when they come to your house, do they?
No, far from being some knight errant who finds the Holy Grail in the form of a venti cup of ordinary joe, Mr. Gill comes off when all is finally said as little more than a benighted jerk.
Disappointing drivel May 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was really looking forward to reading this. I got about two chapters in and just couldn't continue. First of all, this dude takes too long to say anything. He repeats himself. The stories don't always add up (if he's so talented and well-connected, wouldn't SOMEBODY have hired him for more than minimum wage? Yeah, his consulting company may have dried up, but how much effort did he put into finding other work?) and I hated the way he blew off his affair like it's a normal part of life. And, it's not interesting. The writing is boring and wooden. Worst of all, I just couldn't bring myself to care about his predicament. If you are interested in reading a really terrific memoir, I recommend "Sit Ubu Sit" by Gary Goldberg.
 A Super Interesting Book April 30, 2008
From the previous reviews I read, this book is controversial.I found it amazingly interesting and so did two friends for whom I bought copies.
I think of it every time I enter a STARBUCKS. At each one I often ask the baristas if they have read it. NONE have.
 Another "why didn't he get a coach" story April 27, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I can see why this book generates a whole range of responses. As a career consultant, I would encourage Gill's book as a point of discussion.
As Gill tells his story: After being laid off from a top job at J Walter Thompson, he started his own advertising consultancy business. He also wrote a book about successful entrepreneurship, which he doesn't mention, and which seems particularly ironic here.
One afternoon, Gill was taking a break at a Starbucks when he inadvertently stumbled into a job fair: Starbucks was hiring. Managers from all over New York were looking for help. Gill was recruited by Crystal, a particularly strong and effective Starbucks store manager. Motivated by health benefits (he had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor) and frustrated by his lack of business success, he says yes.
The book skillfully navigates the reader between Gill's role (cleaning up at Starbucks and learning to use the register) with a former life that includes meetings with celebrities, topped by a Save Grand Central encounter with Jackie Onassis. He doesn't spare himself when he describes an affair with a young psychiatrist. Readers who rush to judgment should be aware that personal lives can be disrupted by job loss and many displaced executives have done worse.
If I were teaching a course "Careers and Books," I would contrast this book with Cliff Walk, by Don Snyder. Both these authors were caught by surprise when their careers vanished, although we readers can detect warning signs they missed. Both were professionals -- one with high degrees, the other with high position and salary - but they were clueless about starting over at mid-career. So Snyder, who was quite a bit younger than Gill, became a house painter; Gill became a Starbucks barista.
Unlike Snyder, Gill glosses over the difficulties of switching lifestyles. He writes glowingly of the Starbucks ethos, yet we've all been in stores where employees were rude, pastries were stale, and restrooms marked "customers only."
I wasn't bothered by the writing; the book held my interest. But as a career consultant, I had two concerns.
First, career clients often fantasize about leaving high-pressured professional jobs and working in bookstores or coffee shops. These transitions can work (as Gill shows) but sometimes they backfire. Working for a younger manager who's less charismatic than Crystal can create a whole new set of stresses. Cleaning floors may turn out to be satisfying or may bring a whole new round of frustrations.
Second, why didn't someone encourage Gill to call a career consultant? Didn't J Walter Thompson have an outplacement service? And once his business began to slow down, why didn't he hire his own consultant? Marketing consultants hire coaches all the time.
My hunch is that he eventually got tired of the marketing consulting work. He admits he got distracted by his new son. He needed a change. In fact, he could have become a business coach or started his own Internet business.
But he also seems to have run out of energy. He lost the fire. He needed to take a break and re-assess.
Maybe Starbucks was the best solution for Gill. But it's important to keep in mind that it's not the only solution...and for many downsized executives, it will not be a solution at all.
 A bit Sappy, yet Inspirational April 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"How Starbucks Saved my Life" is a quick read, a light-hearted look at how one man adjusted to life's challenges. It chronicles Michael Gates Gill's one-year voyage of self-discovery after he is fired from his high-ranking advertising job and faces social, familial and financial ruin at an age when most men anticipate retirement. Mike's experience at Starbucks is central to the story, and his anecdotes from behind the coffee bar are far more interesting than the rest of his life. Unfortunately, Mike's reflections on his past life are bland, a bit sappy and self-indulgent, and don't really offer any insight into his character. Flashbacks are awkwardly woven into the story, and are often redundant and distracting. Tighter editing would have helped, but then this tale would be reduced to little more than a lengthy magazine essay. Yet, I enjoyed peeking behind the curtain at the world's foremost beverage purveyor -- Starbuck's is an interesting entity. Mike clearly becomes enamored with its corporate culture...even a company as large as Starbuck's couldn't afford to buy this much good publicity.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
