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 luxury—a latté—brooding 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 he’d 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 Michael’s 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 Mike’s friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being. |
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 Very good book |
| Review Date: September 22, 2007 |
| Reviewer: John Leighton, Brooklyn |
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. |
This Little Gem Perfectly Delivers Its Cup of Lessons
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| Review Date: November 26, 2007 |
| Reviewer: Kent Ponder, Albuquerque., NM USA |
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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Starbucks HAS literally saved my life
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| Review Date: January 13, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Lisa C. Hamilton, Marietta, GA |
I was just leaving a local book store today when the spine of How Starbucks Saved My Life caught my eye. I jumped on it. I don't usually buy hardback books -too expensive- but I absolutely had to have this one.
People have said this is a promotional book, but I don't think so. His story is heartfelt and genuine. He finally had to work for a living and found himself humbled by reality. I'm only half way through the book, but I connect with him on a very personal level. I went from making a comfortable living as a Paralegal with a major law firm to a Barista at Starbucks. I went from regular customer to working behind the counter.
Yes, I am a Partner. I'm tooting the Starbucks horn and I work there. Still, it all comes to the same thing. I worked as a Paralegal for many years, but Starbucks has given me more than I could ever give back. I look forward to work. I love the people I work with, the customers I see every day and, naturally, the coffee! Their health benefits are second to none. Though I can only work part time, over the past 3 years they have paid for five major surgeries, including 3 brain surgeries. Starbucks has been very good to me.
Don't let anyone tell you it's some evil corporation taking over the world. Starbucks cares about its employees and its customers as well as profits.
Great book! Thanks for sharing your story, Mr. Gill! (I can't wait to show your book to my manager!) |
Enchanting Story
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| Review Date: March 19, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Jean Marlene, Pittsburgh, PA United States |
This is a delightful book which celebrates "less is more". I really enjoyed reading Michael's journey, with all of its highs and lows. It's fascinating how he could create a positive experience out of a negative one, and he should be an inspiration to anyone who has been down on their luck.
I think Michael's an interesting, good-natured person with a colorful history. The fact that he socialized with Jackie Kennedy, the queen, and famous authors only added to the story and contrasted his stations in life.
Good for you Michael Gates Gill. You are worthy of being an author. This book is good for everyone, especially coffee drinkers. |
Loved this book
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| Review Date: January 1, 2008 |
| Reviewer: MotoGPTech, San Antonio, TX United States |
| At first I was skeptical about this book, having learned it was a story about a man's fall from grace as a "big shot" to a lowly Starbuck's Barista. Instead I became deeply attached to this man and his message - where he basically admits that perhaps his "previous life" of being so status driven and isolated from people who weren't like him was probably a big mistake and a wasted life - and that with his new perspective on people, work (the contrast in management style from his "old life" to the "respect-driven" ethos of Starbucks) he feels happy and more connected to his family for perhaps the first time in his life. |
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