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Best Sellers | | Home How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else | |
|  | |  | | | How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else | | | | | SKU:
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Usually ships in 1-2 business days | | Only 1 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | 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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| | Product Details | | Author: | Michael Gates Gill | | Hardcover: | 272 pages | | Publisher: | Gotham | | Publication Date: | September 20, 2007 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1592402860 | | Package Length: | 7.6 inches | | Package Width: | 5.1 inches | | Package Height: | 1.0 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.8 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 174 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 174 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
111 of 122 found the following review helpful:
 Very good book Sep 22, 2007
By John Leighton
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.
56 of 62 found the following review helpful:
 IT'S THE PEOPLE, NOT THE PLACE Oct 04, 2007
By daSBUX1
Michael Gates Gill's "How Starbucks Saved My Life" is a riches to rags, fish out of water story about a once privileged sixty-something guy who works as a lowly Barista and learns lots of lessons.
I got the feeling Gill wrote his memoir and then plugged Starbucks in as it fit. About 20% of the book happens at Starbucks. The rest is devoted to lambasting the advertising industry (they fired Gill), to family and personal tales (often about how clever Gill was as an advertising account manager), and to dozens of dropped names (e.g., tea with Queen Elizabeth, coffee klatch with Robert Frost, assisting Jackie Kennedy in a charitable endeavor, etc.)
The book is about life changes for Gill, but often his epiphanies are over the top. For instance, only after he loses his job, is divorced twice, goes broke and starts work as a Barista does he discover that subways are crowded, that a black woman can run a successful business, that advertising is different from retail, and that a workaholic doesn't spend enough time with his children.
His Starbucks experiences are also over the top. He cherry picks the good stuff, and leaves the impression he is designing an advertising campaign for Starbucks. Gill proclaims that Starbucks "taught" him the value of teamwork, respect for others, the value of hard labor, and how rewarding the simple life can be. Conveniently, the book is a perfect personal size that will fit cozily in a Starbucks product display.
Having worked at Starbucks for several years, I know that the good things Gill experienced resulted less because of Starbucks and more because of the special people he chanced to work with. When I worked with great people, the experience was good; when my partners were un-great the experience could be awful.
Crystal, Gill's boss, is a black woman who grew from an impoverished and horrible childhood to become an inspired, dedicated, and empathetic boss. Probably, the Starbucks environment facilitated Crystal's development as a manager, but I suspect she would have succeeded in any environment that gave her half a chance. Certainly, without her support and guidance, Starbucks would not have saved Gill's life.
Having said that, Gill's Digest-like writing is crisp, easy to read, and occasionally gripping when you suspend disbelief.
72 of 83 found the following review helpful:
 Hmm, I liked it... Sep 22, 2007
By Suraci
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.
57 of 67 found the following review helpful:
This Little Gem Perfectly Delivers Its Cup of Lessons Nov 26, 2007
By Kent Ponder
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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14 of 14 found the following review helpful:
 Not so uncommon a story. Nov 05, 2007
By Former CEO
While Michael Gates Gill couches this as a fall from grace by a man of privileged background, I think that this is a story common to many individuals who achieved success at one point their lives and then are forced to deal with more moderate circumstances. They could be former CEOs, developers, athletes, managers, rock musicians... All are faced with the same question: What's next for me? How can I replicate the lifestyle, work environment, sense of purpose or adulation that I once had? How do I get back on top? Or, how do I deal with the circumstances that life has presented me?
For most middle aged men, the loss of a job or title is very disorienting. It is a time when many must reexamine their lives. After his fall from Grace, Starbucks provided Gill with structure, an affirming environment, and the opportunity to serve others. He learns that happiness is not about money - though he is quick to illustrate that he knows the value of John Lobb shoes. What makes people happy is a lot deeper and more fundamental.
I picked up this book because myself, and many many others, have traveled along the same path as Gill. There were days following my own precipitous decline from law, entrepreneurship, and leadership of a small corporation that I just wanted to show up at any familiar desk, have my regular cup of coffee, let someone else tell me what to do for 8 hours a day, and hope for an occasional note of praise. It would have been very welcome. Except for income and the embarrassment of dealing with friends - the picture he paints of Starbucks (or more likely for me the local coffee shop) - would have sounded great.
Most of Gill's story is very entertaining, but it could have been much more - which is one reason why I have not rated it more highly. He is candid about his own shortcomings and does a good job of relating his experience and comparing the culture of his former ad agency to Starbucks, particularly noting the different emphasis on human dignity. I think where he stops short - and the reason I thought this this book was a little wooden or "two dimensional" - is in examining why the differences were important to him - and everyone else. I think that I intuitively understand a lot of what he must have experienced - but I did not learn as much from his book as I would have hoped.
A final note on a short passage at the end of the book that detracts significantly - the brief acknowledgement section. Whatever lessons he has learned from his experience at Starbucks appear forgotten, as in this section he steps out of character (like an actor after a performance) and resumes his corporate tone and name-dropping. Of course, I think it would be hard for most of us to have endured his experience, and then with the success of this book, not want to shout: "Screw you Life - you gave me lemons and I made lemonade!" Hopefully, this book enriches the lives of others who read it, and makes his experience more meaningful. I wish him well.
See all 174 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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