Customer Reviews:
 Pass Me a Tissue June 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was going to jump off a bridge this morning, but then i read this book and decided to wait until tomorrow. Very sappy. Starbucks is wonderful, the people are wonderful, the coffee is wonderful, the benefits they offer are wonderfully...someone needs to tell this guy he needs to wipe the chocolate Starbucks brownie off his nose. All that aside there were some enjoyable moments.
Dumped ad guy finds his true calling at coffee house June 3, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Golly and gee whiz! At times this book seemed so much like a long and breathless flack piece for Starbucks that I wanted to put it down. I wanted so much for Gill to write something, anything, negative about the company so that it would seem like an authentic business memoir. As I reached the book's end, though, I realized why he was so gung-ho: he still works as a Starbucks barista.
Gill is an unabashed name-dropper, and some of his celebrity tales strain credibility. I particularly had a hard time buying the one about Ernest Hemingway and bull-running.
The book's strength is in its redemptive story of an arrogant ad man who shed his Yale-educated pride to serve coffee and a smile to others -- and to clean many a toilet with a graceful humility.
It also inspires as an example of landing on one's feet after being dumped by the corporate world late in one's career. Career paths do not have to be linear to be fulfilling.
Starbucks treats its employees, called Partners, with Respect and Dignity, Gill writes. That's something he rarely received or gave at the advertising agency where he spent 25 years.
The Seattle-based company "saved me from my pursuit of empty symbols, but also my anxiety about a fear-filled superficial life that hadn't been, in the end, helpful or even enjoyable for me."
Amidst all the false euphoria, this part of the book rings true. That, and its portrayal of Gill's fellow Partners, make this one worth reading.
And Mike is funny. Glorioso!
 Great humbling story May 23, 2008
This book was fantastic. Michael Gates Gill (Mike) loses his job as a big wig advertising executive to someone half his age. He is sitting in his local Starbucks drinking a latte trying to figure out what to do next and a woman working for Starbucks asks him if he wants a job. His entire life changes after that moment. He takes the job, struggles with his "stumbling down the ladder" mind-set, overcomes his insecurities, humbles himself, becomes happy, develops friendships, and life ultimately is re-born for this guy.
The way Michael Gates Gill wrote the story is very interesting. He has met many famous people in his life (and he's not afraid to share that in the book) that don't seem to mean as much to him as his usual guests that he serves everyday and his partners. Great story, I highly recommend this book!
Simple but effective May 19, 2008
Many of the reviewers so far seem to be injecting their own biases into their interpretation of this book. We all do that, I suppose, but usually not to such a distracting degree. This seems to be a rather polarizing work.
I've read better-written books but I was consistently impressed with how willing Mr. Gill is to expose his psyche. I could almost envision a therapist giving him the assignment to write this memoir so he could start healing. His life was obviously difficult for him to assimilate (although some of us may sneer at the concept of a life of privilege being difficult). As to the name-dropping, I thought the original purpose of name-dropping was to impress or even intimidate one's listeners/readers. Mr. Gill is merely sharing his experiences.
It seems to me that he is still dealing with feelings of inferiority and perhaps a little shame at daring to write a book which will inevitably be compared to the journalistic stylings of his larger-than-life father. A great writer he is not, but he seems to be a good human being with a good story to tell.
Personally, I am intrigued by the whole Starbuck's experience, as a customer, and I was interested and moved to read Mr. Gill's story from the vantage point of a "Partner." As someone close to his age, it is good to know that if the job I currently have and love were to fall apart, there is someone out there who has successfully started over and grown from the experience.
 Benighted Errant May 13, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
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.
|
