How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else (Hardcover)

~ Michael Gates Gill (Author) "This is the true, surprising story of an old white man who was kicked out of the top of the American Establishment, by chance met..." (more)
Key Phrases: tall latte, bean wall, condiment bar, New York, Grand Central, Walter Thompson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill grew up meeting the likes of Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. A Yale education led to a job at prestigious J. Walter Thompson Advertising. But at 63, the younger Gill's sweet life has gone sour. Long fired from JWT, his own business is collapsing and an ill-advised affair has resulted in a new son and a divorce. At this low point, and in need of health insurance for a just diagnosed brain tumor, Gill fills out an application for Starbucks and is assigned to the store on 93rd and Broadway in New York City, staffed primarily by African-Americans. Working as a barista, Gill, who is white, gets an education in race relations and the life of a working class Joe . Gill certainly has a story to tell, but his narrative is flooded with saccharine flashbacks, when it could have detailed how his very different, much younger colleagues, especially his endearing 28-year-old manager, Crystal Thompson, came to accept him. The book reads too much like an employee handbook, as Gill details his duties or explains how the company chooses its coffee. Gill's devotion to the superchain has obviously changed his life for the better, but that same devotion makes for a repetitive, unsatisfying read. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Yale graduate, prosperous ad exec: Gill has it all. Then he turns 60 and finds himself precipitously bounced from his job and saddled with the triple threats of a ruined marriage, an unexpected newborn, and a brain tumor. Despairing at the prospect of looming poverty, he stops at a Manhattan Starbucks to comfort himself with a latte. By chance he sits down next to Crystal, a young African American woman recruiting new workers for the coffee giant, and she offers him a job. Almost as an act of desperation, he accepts, and he dons the uniform of a barista-in-training at an Upper West Side Starbucks. This son of privilege who had hobnobbed with Queen Elizabeth, T. S. Eliot, and Jackie Onassis, now keeps daily company with a diverse crew of brash young New Yorkers for whom Starbucks' progressive employee benefits and demanding, inspiring standards of public service offer hope. Gill starts at the bottom, cleaning the bathroom, and he has trouble mastering the cash register. Over the months he learns to deeply respect Crystal, to appreciate the mutual support of his coworkers, and to genuinely cherish the passing parade of customers, each unique. To his own astonishment, he realizes that he actually looks forward joyfully to every hectic, exhausting workday. Other corporate giants can only envy the sheer goodwill that this memoir will inevitably generate for Starbucks. What a read. Knoblauch, Mark

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; 1st Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 edition (September 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592402860
• ISBN-13: 978-1592402861
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (144 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #272,686 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 108 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book, September 22, 2007

By	John Leighton (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the story of a wealthy ad executive who is laid off (in a case of blatant ageism) and must then turn to finding an hourly job at Starbucks to make ends meet. He has the classic rich Manhattanite life trajectory: private school, Ivy League, corporate job with lots of income. He does spend a lot of time away from family though, which prefigures events to come later. He is, both through the reader's own instinct and his telling us so, one of those New Yorkers who has never really met middle class people. It's a sheltered life, but comfortable.

Gill tells his story well and doesn't hold back on the self-deprecation, not at all. His divorce came about for the understandable reason that he met a single, 40ish woman into the arts who lived alone. Mysterious enough for you? So, intrigued and feeling emotionally unmoored with no job, he has an affair and fathers a child. His family is understandably devastated, and the scenes in this memoir of them are wrenching.

Thrown out of the house, with no job, his money runs out and he must learn to be middle class from nearly scratch. He decides Starbucks would work when he reflects how he spends times there and when the local manager and him have one of those conversations blacks and whites have that sound mistrustful but are actually seeking closeness and racial harmony.

From there, Gill confronts all the things that he'd never learned to do; like the simple self-satisfaction of work, independent living, how to handle solitude, and getting to know people unlike himself. Time and again, Gill points out how his pre-fall opinion of someone and how wrong he was, and his post-fall new, more mature appreciation of them. He does it in a way that is tender and loving, and he allows for the sizable resentment some readers may feel at hearing someone used to limos talk about not wanting to walk on 96th Street. 96th Street for god's sake! My first day living here I went to 96th Street to people-watch! I once had a girlfriend who got fired from a publishing job and worked at Barnes and Noble for three weeks, until she couldn't deal with being 22 and being so "common." I thought of her as I read this book.

The PW editorial review is totally misleading, by the way. He talks about as much as you'd expect about the Starbucks job. For a book dealing with his new life, that is expected. Plus, for all the talk about how great Starbucks is, you never really hear about how the place works.

One thing - I didn't realize that the baristas are supposed to talk to you and make conversation. My whole lifetime of going to Starbucks, it's happened once, I see in retrospect.

Definitely get this book.

65 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hmm, I liked it..., September 22, 2007

By	Suraci - See all my reviews

I really liked this book. I found it to be a light, entertaining read. I enjoyed the conversational tone and the glimpse at Starbucks behind the scenes. The more I read, the more I liked the characters and felt drawn into their world. You know a book is good when you're disappointed that it's over. It's a book you will definitely want to share with friends.

I was fortunate to meet the author during his current book tour. Like his writing, he is engaging, candid and fun. His message is refreshing in that he feels happier now with far less.

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Little Gem Perfectly Delivers Its Cup of Lessons, November 26, 2007

By	Kent Ponder (Albuquerque., NM USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Though I'm not even a coffee drinker, much less a Starbucks frequenter, I've chosen to review this book for two reasons: (1) my strong sense of kinship with the author (though I've never met or spoken with him); (2) my desire to offset the cynically negative reviews here by reassuring readers of the book's essential genuineness (despite its recurrent sales-pitch-for-Starbucks tone).

As you'll read in more detail in other reviews here, Gill claims to have stepped "down" from his Yale and top-ad-exec background, to don a Starbucks apron, serving coffee and cleaning sinks and toilets. Could this have really happened? Could a sane man really be happy with such a swaperoo of lifestyles? I think so.

With my experience as an academic researcher, I've taken the time to check out Gill's background and general credibility. Why would I do that? Because this book's less-is-more message, and manual-work-is honorable message, are so important for our times. Many of the negative Amazon reviews here are cynical about Gill's alleged motives, snide about his professed new attitude toward African Americans with menial jobs, and dubious about his claimed contentment with manual labor following his ivy-league career.

But my somewhat similar experiences tell me that Gill's claims ring true. I've lived and taught in New York and know the neighborhoods he describes. I've researched his executive background, read Joyce Wadler's NY Times article with photos of the Bronxville mansion, etc. Is his professed happiness with far less money and prestige credible? I think so. First, everything about him consistently checks out. And then there's my own analogous experience. After my Ph.D. done at Stanford, Yale and Georgetown, my teaching at the US Naval Academy, etc., I accepted a huge drop in professional prestige by becoming a rookie distributor of a multi-level-marketed cosmetics company, working daily with relatively uneducated people. Years later, after earning a pile of money as a marketer, marketing researcher, author and consultant, I took another big social step downward by getting rid of my pristine Rolls Royce Silver Shadow and moving out of my 5,000 sq. ft. house, now driving daily in a faded and dented '86 Chevy pickup and wearing thrift-store jeans, sweatshirts and sneakers, and helping yardcare guys haul leaves and trash to the dump in my pickup. And I can't begin to tell you how much happier I am with so much less, including a $20 Casio plastic watch.

So when Gill describes how he enjoys his "menial" job and his small walk-up apartment, I have no problem relating to that and believing him. When he describes his newfound pleasure as an older white guy working daily with young African Americans behind a counter, I can relate and sense that what he says rings true. (I've also had two African American sons-in-law, and I'm an older white guy, so I also relate to these aspects of the book, not perceiving any racial-adjustment phoniness that some negative reviewers here allege.)

A couple of reviewers caustically pan Gill's writing style, describing it as of seventh-grade level. But though I have a doctorate in linguistics and have written a ton of sales material, I don't agree. I think the book's tone and style effectively communicate its simple message about -- simplicity.

A few reviewers here lament Gill's frequent name-dropping. But note that I too have done a little of the same. Why would Gill (or I) have done that? I think it's because reference to highly respected people or institutions helps build credibility of opinion. When I read that Gill has personally known and worked with celebrities, etc., I don't perceive it as bragging, but rather as Gill's means of emphasizing the "height" of the status he left behind, in order to better illustrate the point of being satisfied with so much less -- to better illustrate the point that even a person who has closely associated with the most famous can deeply appreciate the most common working person. Various world religions have long attempted to teach this very lesson. In the US, where adoration of celebrity has become a fixation tantamount to mental aberration, this lesson, too, is vital for our times.

In short, I recommend this book strongly on several levels. And if Gill as an ex-ad guy has additionally sensed that this book can get him back into the promo circuit (and even the subject of a movie starring perhaps Tom Hanks), I don't think that mars the book's main messages or core value. I think we as readers should just relax regarding the praising of Starbucks that so regularly pops up (after all, if it saved his life, why wouldn't he praise it), and accept the book for its underlying essential genuineness as a valid story of growth of the human spirit through new appreciation of diversity.

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