I picked up How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of the Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill on a whim. What an interesting idea - a story of riches to rags, the antithesis of your “normal” Hollywood plot.

In a nutshell, Michael Gates Gill (whose mother used to call him “Gatesy” as a boy - no wonder he was messed up!) was raised in a very rich family. Nannies, huge mansions, Yale education, lots of celebrities over the house…the whole shebang. He was hired right out of college at an advertising agency, and he spent 25 years there, giving them literally the best years of his life.

They fired him for being too old, at age 53 - they wanted a young group of hard-charging associates who would give the impression of being “cutting edge.” With sparse white hair, he was not the man for the job any longer.

He spent several years trying to run a consulting business but it never really took off. In the meanwhile, his wife divorced him because he was stupid enough to a) Have a mistress and b) Get her pregnant.  Here the book began: He was broke, without family support or friends, and had no job.

Enter Starbucks.

He got a job at Starbucks more or less on a whim. He’s lucky he even got it. During the interview, the interviewer asked if he had ever worked retail. He gave her a blank stare. She clarified, “You know, like Wal-Mart?” Turns out, he had never even been inside of a Wal-Mart, let alone worked at one.

From that less-than-auspicious beginning grew a dedication between Mike (as he called himself at Starbucks) and the Starbucks chain. He sings their praises throughout the book - the health benefits offered, the great work atmosphere, the money Starbucks offers their employees to get a college education. It almost made me want to work at a Starbucks myself, except I’ve already found my perfect job.

There were a few things that bothered me (you knew it was coming!) Mr. Gill spends quite a bit of time reminiscing on his past life, and tells stories about famous people he met.

It got to the point where I felt like all he was doing was name-dropping (look at me, I’m special, I’ve met Jackie Kennedy and Frank Sinatra and Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali and Robert Frost and…the list goes on.) I’m not a big fan of people who name drop, so to me this got to be annoying.

He also talks about how he made the change from being an autocratic snob to now believing in affirmative action, the implication being that if you don’t agree with affirmative action, you are an autocratic snob. I didn’t think that the inclusion of a political subject like that was of much help to the story line, nor did I appreciate the implication that I was an autocratic snob, since I don’t think reverse discrimination is any better than the original discrimination. How is discriminating against a second group of people better than discriminating against the first group of people?

He also had a rather stilted manner of writing that made it obvious this was the first book he wrote, and that no ghost writer helped him out along the way.  He wasn’t horrible, he just wasn’t that great either.

But all of that aside, it was an okay autobiography, and it did make me think about the question of how much of our happiness is our circumstances, and how much of it is our attitude. For Mr. Gill, he was happier working at Starbucks and living in a cruddy apartment than he had ever been living in a huge mansion but slaving away at his job. It’s a great book to help you rethink your priorities.

In the end, How Starbucks Saved My Life garners 3.75 out of 5 stars. If you’re a Starbucks lover, then I’d rate this as a must read.

Hava

Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton was an absolute mess of a book.  I started reading the book with the following in mind:

1) I liked President Clinton for his economic policies (I’m going to review Alan Greenspan’s book, Age of Turbulence in a little while and I’ll make sure to tell you then what Alan said about Clinton’s track record on economics, but suffice it to say that he did a good job in that respect.)  I didn’t like the fact that he seemed to chase after every woman in a skirt.

2) I didn’t like Monica Lewinsky.  After all, when the whole thing was happening, there really wasn’t much that would have inspired me to go, “Wow, what a neat lady!” but instead, rather the opposite.  Even ardent Clinton supporters weren’t cheering Monica on, but rather saying that if he had an affair, it wasn’t the nation’s business.

3) I expected this book to be unbiased, or at least not blatantly leaning one way or the other.  This is not Monica having someone ghostwrite her story for her - it’s written by Andrew Morton, and as he made sure to point out in the beginning, Monica had only the power to do fact checking, and nothing else.  She couldn’t change something he said, as long as it was true, no matter how unflattering of a light it cast on her.  I took this to mean he would be unbiased.  Crazy me, I know.

4) I expected to learn to like Monica, because after all, this book was about her and what happened in her life.  Once you “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” (or at least watch them walk that mile, lol!) you start to appreciate better what they went through, and you gain greater sympathy for them.  I expected to learn things about Monica that I didn’t know before, and end up having a higher opinion of her than I did to start with.

5) I expected the book to cover the whole situation thoroughly and give me the background to understand what was going on.  I was in high school when the scandal broke, and I didn’t have the time or the inclination to pay much attention.  All I knew was that there was an intern messing around with the president, some Starr guy was in there somehow, and there was a blue dress with semen on it.  Oh, and Clinton said his infamous line, “That depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.”   That was all I knew before starting this book.  I expected to have the gaps filled in, and then some.

Pretty much every one of my preconceived notions got blown to smithereens.

I will say that my view on Clinton’s economic policies didn’t change (since that wasn’t even mentioned in this book), and I saw nothing to change my mind on the fact that he chased every woman in a skirt.  My opinion of him (already low) sank lower as I read what happened.  Is it possible to have negative respect for someone?

But the idea that the author would pretend to be unbiased is utterly laughable.  He didn’t even try.  Although he stopped short of calling Linda Tripp the devil incarnate, he came pretty darn close.  Here’s a quotation that really made my eyebrows raise:

[Tripp], who emerges as the wicked witch in this tragic fairy story, constantly dangled the rosy-skinned apple of romance in front of a trusting and gullible Monica Lewinsky. Page 96, Monica’s Story

Wow.  So Monica was an innocent Snow White, Linda Tripp was the wicked witch, and what, Bill Clinton was the prince?

Gag me with a spoon.

Even with Mr. Morton’s strenuous efforts to make Monica out into the good guy in this story (a story that quite frankly I don’t think has a good guy) Monica still ended up completely unlikable.  She never once says that she’s sorry she had an affair with President Clinton.  Not once.  She does say a couple of times that she was sorry she got caught, but to me that’s almost worse.

The more I learned about her in the book, the more I was unsurprised at that lack of regret.  She actually had an affair with a married man before she ever met Pres. Clinton - a five year affair that was an on-again, off-again tumultuous mess that I felt dirty even reading about.  She met Andy Bleiler when he was engaged to someone else, but Monica and Andy still dated for two years.  In the meanwhile, he gets married, and his wife gets pregnant.  When the wife is 3 - 4 months pregnant, Monica finally sleeps with Andy for the first time, at age 19.  She eventually becomes good friends with the wife (kid you not!) and even babysits the children so the husband and wife can go out on dates together!  She buys the children Christmas presents and is considered “one of the family” even as she’s secretly boinking the husband.  Monica at one point breaks up with Andy because she was angry - he dared to cheat on her with another girlfriend, something he did more than once.  Could it get more ironic than that?

Monica spends most of her time in this book crying.  I should go back through and highlight every time Monica spends the weekend crying, sobbing, or self-medicating by eating herself into oblivion.  I think the tally would shock you.  She is not emotionally stable and I wanted to just shake her by her shoulders and say, “What on this green earth are you doing?!  How can you be so smart yet be so incredibly stupid at the same time?”  After all, she was a very smart cookie, when it came to book smarts.  But she was as dumb as rocks when it came to men.  As of the writing of this book in 1999, she’d had two serious relationships in her life - both with married men.  I’m hoping that track record has improved since then, but I don’t care enough to find out.

Then you’ve got the one thing you would think would be a no-brainer: Cover the situation well so that the reader knows what’s happening.  Even this didn’t happen.  Mr. Morton would say things like, “Which led to the famous cigar incidence” or “Which brought about the famous news conference,” and then not explain what famous news conference, or what famous cigar incident (although I eventually pieced that one together. ;-))  I was completely lost.  Even if I had paid attention at the time, I wouldn’t remember it 10+ years after the fact.  It was as if the writer sat down with the idea in his mind that all of his readers had read and memorized the Starr Report, plus read all of the large newspapers’ coverage of the shenanigan, and would be able to remember the smallest details about what happened.  His goal was to provide Monica’s point of view, and nothing else, and that’s exactly what he did.

I didn’t even finish the book.  I felt like I had read 136 pages of tabloid magazine crap, and that was more than enough.  There was no way I was going to be able to make it through another 143 pages of this junk.  It made me feel dirty, as if I had just indulged myself in a two day marathon of horrid, catty, nasty gossiping.  I felt like I needed a shower when I put it down.

I give this one 0.75 out of 5 stars.  I wouldn’t wish this book on anyone.  If you’ve made it your life goal to learn everything you can about Monica Lewinsky, I guess you could read it, but I’d suggest finding a new life goal instead - something actually worth obtaining.

Havs