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

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How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
by Michael Gates Gill
from Gotham

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

• Couldn't Make It To The End...
  I wanted to like this book, I really did. The premise was great - a man who's had everything pretty much handed to him most of his life loses his job and has to learn the value of hard labor. Along the way he learns that he has been prejudiced and unfair in his perceptions of others.
  As great as the premise was, the resulting book was just slightly short of terrible. Gill does not have a talent for writing (to say the least) and the whole memoir sounds like a long conversation. He dips into his past on... more info

• Unusual true story
  Michael Gates Gill grew up in a wealthy household, graduated from Yale University, and had a lucrative career with a top advertising agency in New York. When he hit his 60's he lost his prestigious job, had a health scare, and had a strained relationship with several of his five children. Frightened by his inability to support himself, he took a job at Starbuck's which was offered to him half-heartedly and partly in jest while he was in a store as a customer. The job and his co-workers changed his life... more info

• Laughable Schlock
  When I picked this book out at the library, I knew I was in for a sappy, corny, gimmicky literary ride, but I was hoping that the narrator would at least provide some quasi-intriguing insights into how Starbucks' corporate values and philosophies can be applied to life's everyday trials and tribulations (plus curveballs like acute illness). Let me just say, hahahahaha. Michael Gates Gill is the most unsympathetic of characters imaginable. He's insufferably clueless, but if he actually had one iota of... more info

• Do not Buy this Book!
  I heard of this book on NPR, I think. Because I heard about it on NPR, I think, I figured it was a credible work of art. As luck would have it I was in the condominium's library and this book was sitting there, so I grabbed it, and over the course of a weekend read it.
  What I liked about this book was that I read it and finished it. It was an hyper-easy read. The average American doesn't read one book a year, and as this is only August I am one up on the average American. That is what I liked about the... more info

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