Shut Up, I’m Talking (And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government) by Gregory Levey was a downright hilarious book.  I spent at least half of the book laughing uproariously.  I think it rather annoyed my husband, actually.

But here’s the general gist of the book: This is the autobiography of Gregory Levey , who grew up as a secular Jew in Canada.  He went to a Jewish school for elementary and junior high, and then went to regular public school for high school.  So he was raised somewhat in the Jewish background, although he is atheist and doesn’t believe in the Jewish religion, or in God in general.

Well, he decides as a second-year law student that law school was just way, way too boring, and he wants to go join the Israeli Army (yes, this is rather random, but as you’ll see as you read his book, most of his life seems to be have been rather random.  In fact, I’d say that sums up his life in a nutshell: Random).  While waiting for his army stint to begin, he decides that he wants to be an intern at the UN for the Israeli government, and so he spends several months trying to do just that.  He ends up getting a job as a speech writer instead.

His story proceeds from there, and I don’t want to give everything away so I won’t, but can I just tell you again how darn FUNNY this book is?  Usually when I read a book, I try to mark the pages that I think are particularly humorous/heartwarming /touching, or otherwise noteworthy, so I can use the quotes in my review.  For Shut Up, I’m Talking, I realized that I would basically have to quote the entire first chapter.  But I’m just not that dedicated to this job, sorry.

But I will quote from the introduction (the Author’s Note).  Here it is:

As I write this note, things don’t look good in the Middle East.  I’m not sure when you’re reading this, but I assume that things still don’t look good in the Middle East, because they never really do.  If things looked good in the Middle East, it wouldn’t look like the Middle East.  It might look like, say, Canada, with camels.

Having been to the Middle East, and having ridden on a camel, that struck me as particularly funny.  Or perhaps my sense of humor has been seriously screwed up by a lack of sleep lately, who knows.

Although this is a great book about the inside workings of the UN and of the Israeli government, it by no means is a definitive book about what is happening in the Middle East.  In fact, that is rather the point of the book: The author realizing that there really is no plan when it comes to politics and policy.  Everyone in the Israeli government is basically playing it by ear, 24/7.  It’s a disheartening, eye-opening, and laughter-inducing book.

I couldn’t put it down.  4.75 out of 5 stars.  Great book - I’m hoping this won’t be the last we hear of Gregory Levey.

Hava

I had to read His Favorite Wife: Trapped in Polygamy by Susan Ray Schmidt after I found out that it was written a sister wife of the author of Shattered Dreams (in other words, they were both married to the same man, Verlan LeBaron.)  Irene Spencer had had a lot to say about Susan in her book (mainly, that she was Verlan’s favorite wife, and why was she always being treated so special?) and I wanted to see it from Susan’s perspective.

I’m glad I did - it was definitely one of the better written polygamy books.  I enjoyed it a lot more than Irene’s book, simply because Susan didn’t spend half of the book complaining about how she wasn’t “getting any,” like Irene did.  Susan was definitely unhappy with Verlan most of the time, but she didn’t wallow in it, and I was grateful for that.

I also felt like this book was a lot more exciting and gave a better understanding of that time period when it came to polygamy, because Susan talks quite a bit about her brother-in-law, Ervil LeBaron, a famous polygamist that had his own brother killed, along with some of his wives, children, and other people he thought deserved to die.   Irene said in her book that she specifically didn’t talk about Ervil because she didn’t want him to overwhelm her story, but because of that, I felt as if a large chunk of important information was left out.  Susan’s story was much more complete.

But not only was it more complete, but Susan’s writing style was better.  When she was a child, the writing was more simplistic, and the reasoning she did was more simplistic too.  As she grows up, the book becomes more in-depth, and you can see her change and mature before your eyes.  I felt that really added to the book.

If you’re interested in a follow-up after finishing His Favorite Wife, you’ll want to check out this website, where Susan does a question and answer session with readers.  Make sure to read the comments too - she and her daughter write out responses there also.  It was very interesting to see that Susan and Irene are good friends even to this day - I would think that would be very difficult, but I guess they’ve had years to get past all of the baggage that would have come with this lifestyle.

Tangent: While researching on the internet, I found out that Susan is living in the same city I am, here in Idaho.  What an incredibly small world this is!!  I wonder if she has ever come down to the library and I’ve met her and simply didn’t know it…I’ll have to keep my eyes open for her.

Well, out of the four polygamy books that I’ve read (Shattered Dreams, Stolen Innocence, Escape, and now His Favorite Wife) the tally is two Christians, one (maybe) Mormon (still not sure about that one), and one atheist.  As I’ve read these books, I’ve wondered what the majority of ex-FLDS believers become - if they do tend to go towards Christianity or another religion (or none at all).  I’m sure that no formal study has ever been done, so I guess I’ll just have to keep wondering…

Anyway, if you’re interested in polygamy in the 1960’s and 70’s, then you’ll definitely want to pick His Favorite Wife up.  It gives an eye-opening insight to what it is truly like to be a polygamist wife (and there is pretty much nothing good about it).  If you’re wanting an up-to-date picture of polygamy and what’s happening now, you’ll want to check out Stolen Innocence instead.

I give His Favorite Wife 4.25 out of 5 stars.  I’ll be keeping my eyes open for Susan around town!

Havs

I am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility by Trisha Meili was an amazing testament of the human will to get better - the indomitable human spirit.

I was only 8 when Trisha Meili was attacked in Central Park, and so I have no recollection of the event being publicized across the nation.  Kids can be so oblivious, and I think I tended to be more oblivious than most.  I had heard references of it in passing through the years, so when I saw her book on the shelf, I knew the very general outlines of what had happened.

But nothing could have prepared me for this book.  It was an autobiography (one of my favorite kinds of books) but better yet, it was written by a person who didn’t wallow in self-pity, who didn’t whine and complain about how hard life was, and who certainly didn’t play the blame game.  She was too busy getting better!

Can I just say how darn likable she is?  Trisha pushes herself through therapy, determined to get better, determined to not let this ruin her life.  And she had a lot of therapy to go through - she was in the hospital for seven months.  In a coma for weeks.  She has to learn how to swallow, how to roll over, how to walk, how to eat, how to think, how to make decisions - all over again.

She said that she went from being a baby to being an adult in seven months.  She is a true inspiration because she has such a can-do spirit.  For anyone who has suffered through a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) there couldn’t be a better book to read than this one.  And even for those of us who haven’t, there is still so much to learn from her.

Part of the story is her love life - she dated quite a few men throughout the book, and I kept hoping she’d find her true love by end.  And (not to ruin the story or anything!) but she finally did.  I loved reading that part, because it just seemed so fitting that after she’s gone through a rebirth in her life, she would finally be ready to find The One.

If you want a feel-good, inspirational story, you honestly couldn’t get any better than this one.

4.75 out of 5 stars.  Good luck, Trisha - I wish you all the best!

Havs

I’m not sure how to describe 1 Dead in the Attic: After Katrina by Chris Rose. It was very depressing, yet at times made me laugh and gave me hope for this world.

I guess I could start with the easy stuff: The author is a columnist at The Times-Picayune, the local newspaper for New Orleans. The book is a compilation of his daily columns, starting after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

Some of the columns were darkly funny, some of the columns were just plain dark.  Some of them gave you a renewed confidence in mankind, others made you question how people that horrid could have lived for so long.

I can say one thing for sure: This was an eye-opener of a book.  I have never been to New Orleans, and so I witnessed the destruction on TV with horrified detachment, much as most of America did.  A few months after it happened it faded from view and I forgot about it, to be honest.  I didn’t want to, and I didn’t mean to, but life does have a habit of going on.

1 Dead in the Attic was a needed reminder that although I may have moved on, life in New Orleans didn’t, at least not in the same way.  Many people suffered through bouts of depression; some people committed suicide because of it.  I’ve never lived through anything like Hurricane Katrina, and I had never thought about what would be happening a year after the storm hit, or two years, or three.  If I had, I would have realized on an intellectual level that people would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I never got that far.

I’m feeling rather guilty now for my negligence, but that can’t be blamed on Rose.  He doesn’t set out to make the readers depressed.  It’s just how I reacted.

Lest you think the whole book is depressing, let me share one of the funnier columns with you.  Although Rose stayed in New Orleans after Katrina, the rest of his family went to Maryland and stayed for several months, so he would travel back and forth between the two cities regularly.  Here is a column about one such trip:

[B]efore each journey, I check with my kids by phone to see what they need from our house in New Orleans.

Of course, they need everything, they tell me.  Every toy, every article of clothing, every piece of furniture, everything that hangs on the walls, every piece of building material down to the studs.

“Itemize,” I urge them.

“Barbies,” they tell me.

“I can do that,” I tell them.

And so my chore began one afternoon, as I crouched and crawled into their secret places in our house - small, dark spaces I have never been in, places that are not hospitable to people larger than, say, a dorm refrigerator.

In the process, I discovered that there has been a population of approximately fifty Barbies living under my roof.  I did not know this.

An absurd number, I was thinking, but then I remembered that I used to collect empty egg cartons when I was a kid and I probably had a couple hundred - a closet full of them - before my mother brought the hammer down on that curious little hobby of mine.

Truth is, I don’t recall even the barest notion of why I collected egg cartons nor what I did with them.   I just did.  So who am I to tell my kids they have too many Barbies?

Let them be, I say.  I mean, I turned out okay, right?

Don’t answer that.

~Page 81 - 82 of 1 Dead in the Attic by Chris Rose

He is extremely easy to read; I’ve had good luck with newspaper writers in the past, and this book was no exception.  He is a talented writer.  He is frank and direct, and everything is so real that you feel as if you too lived through the destruction that Hurricane Katrina wrought upon New Orleans.

My only critique of the book was that the columns were not in chronological order, nor could I see that there was any rhyme or reason to how they were published.  It was disconcerting to see that we had jumped back in time three months for no apparent reason.  I eventually stopped paying attention to the dates of the columns so it would stop bothering me, an easy fix.

Overall, I give 1 Dead in the Attic 4.75 out of 5 stars.  And my thanks to Mr. Rose for publishing it.  I needed to read this book.

Havs

I have to confess: I’ve never read a single Nicholas Sparks book. I own the movie The Notebook, and only found out by pure chance a couple of weeks ago that it was based on a Nicholas Sparks book. I had no clue. I check out a lot of Nicholas Sparks books to patrons, and quite frankly, all of the titles just run together in my mind. I had never paid attention to the fact that one of them was named The Notebook. A keen eye for details, I have not.

So why did I read Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas and Micah Sparks? Well, I was wandering about Barnes and Noble with my husband, and for once, I was waiting for him to finish reading a book before we could go. (Needless to say, it’s usually the other way around). I wandered over to the biography section, and there was Three Weeks With My Brother. I was surprised. I hadn’t realized that Nicholas Sparks had written anything but fiction. I picked the book up and started reading.

And just loved it. I was laughing (quietly, of course - heaven forbid I get kicked out of B&N!) just a few pages in. He has an excellent writing style, which after I thought about it, realized it only made sense. The guy makes his living by writing. If his writing style left something to be desired, I rather think he wouldn’t be on the New York Times Bestseller list regularly.

I can’t testify myself that his fiction writing style is fantastic, but I can his memoir writing style. His parents were unique in their child-raising techniques, to say the least. The following is a little long, but I think captures the childhood of Nicholas and his older brother, Micah, quite well:

On the first day of kindergarten, Mom walked with Micah to the bus stop; from there forward, he walked by himself. Within a week, he told my mom that some older girls, 7th grade or thereabouts but huge to a kindergartener, had cornered him in the junkyard and taken his milk money. Then they threatened him; they said that if he didn’t bring them a nickel every day, they were going to hurt him.

“They said they’re going to beat me up bad,” Micah cried.

There are a number of ways a parent could handle such a situation. My mom could have started walking him to school regularly, for instance, or walked with him one day, confronted the girls, and threatened to call the police if another incident occurred…Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and…when she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before.

“We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ‘em with it. Like this…”

Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.

The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.

In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.

“I swung with everything I had,” he said.

“Weren’t you scared?”

With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”

The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.
~Page 25 - 26 of Three Weeks With My Brother

Yup, the mother actually showed her son (a kindergartener) how to beat up a group of 7th graders, and more amazingly still, he succeeded.  The parents were big fans of the Tough Love School of Parenting.

They were…relaxed, I guess is the kindest way to put it, in their parenting style. They gave their kids BB guns, which Nicholas (they called him Nicky as a child) and Micah used with wild abandon until the sheriff came and took them away. To console the children, the parents then gave them a bow and arrow set, with real arrows. None of the wussy plastic shafts and bunted tips for them. The kids played with that until (you guessed it) the sheriff came and took that away too. They came a little too close to killing other people one too many times.

So where does the three weeks part come in? Well, in 2002, Nicholas and Micah embark on a trip around in the world, which lasts for three weeks. It’s quite an adventure, and Nicholas always starts the chapter out in present time, and then jumps back in history to their childhood. It is their autobiography, not just a story about those three weeks in 2002. And I do mean “their” - really, it’s an autobiography of the whole Sparks family, with the emphasis on Nicholas and Micah.

I cried hard and laughed a lot too - it is one of the best autobiographies that I have ever read. Even if you’ve never read a lick of Sparks’ writing and have no interest in learning more about him (hmmm…sounds familiar) if you like autobiographies, you’ll love this book. Heck, if you just love a good story, you’ll love this book.

I’m giving it a rare 5 out of 5 stars. Thanks for the amazing book, Nicky. I just might have to read one of your fiction books someday…

Havs

Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer has more than a heck of a subtitle.  It contains an amazing story about a girl forced into marriage at a stunning 14 years of age, and to a 19-year-old first cousin to boot.

I have read three polygamy autobiographies now: Shattered Dreams, Escape, and Stolen Innocence.  Out of those three, I enjoyed Stolen Innocence the most.  As I said in my review of Escape, Carolyn Jessop seemed to be very bitter towards the FLDS Church and everything that had happened to her.  I didn’t get that vibe from this book - instead, Elissa seemed to concentrate on showing how much she loved her family, and the fact that what she was doing was for her family.  She carries a picture of her two younger sisters in her wallet with her at all times, so she can remember that she’s fighting to give her sisters freedom from the FLDS cult and everything that comes along with it.

Elissa’s story is markedly different from Carolyn Jessop’s or Irene Spencer’s.  She is the first wife of her husband, Allen Steed, and he never takes on another wife, so she doesn’t deal with “sister wives” and everything that comes along with that.

She also gets pregnant four times in two years, but loses three to miscarriages and one as a stillbirth, so when she leaves the sect, she doesn’t worry about trying to sneak any children out with her.  At the time, she thought that God was mad at her, which was why he kept killing her babies (this is a common teaching in the FLDS Church - if you lose a baby, it’s because you’ve done something wrong and God is cursing you for it).

She found out after she got out and had prenatal care for her next pregnancy, that she had Rh-negative blood, something easily fixed by modern medicine, but otherwise fatal for the babies.  She has had two children since then with no problems.

It’s amazing what modern medicine and simply having access to information can do.

Another big difference in the books is the poverty that the other two women suffered - Elissa Wall doesn’t focus on any of that.  Her parents go through periods of prosperity and then periods of difficulties, but overall, her family was much better off than many polygamous families are.  Her father has specialized skills, and the jobs he was able to do were high-paying.  This made for a big difference in Elissa’s quality of life.

Last but definitely not least is how her family got into polygamy to begin with.  In the other books, the families had been in the FLDS Church for generations.  The Walls, on the other hand, grew up LDS.  Elissa’s father and his first wife, Audrey, were practicing Mormons when Audrey’s parents joined the FLDS Church.  Hoping to disprove the FLDS Church and find flaws in it, they started studying the religion.  They ended up joining the FLDS Church instead.

It’s not terribly common for people to convert to the FLDS Church, so for a long time, they were looked upon as outsiders.  Along with that was the fact that Audrey wasn’t born and raised with the idea that polygamy was the correct way of life, and so for her, when her husband married Elissa’s mother, Sharon Steed, and then later on was given a third wife, it was very difficult for her to handle.  This made for a tense family life.

The children, however, were raised in a fairly relaxed environment because of the background of the parents, so they often did things that other families in the religion did not: Attend concerts, football games, play musical instruments, ride ATV vehicles, listen to classical music, and more.  I think that this more open environment was a big help to Elissa when she finally did get out of the church.

What makes her story the most remarkable, of course, is the fact that it was Elissa’s story that helped put Warren Jeffs behind bars.  He was prosecuted for being an accomplice in rape - her rape.  She was forced to marry her cousin, and then when she went to Warren and complained that she was being forced to do things she didn’t want to do (she literally didn’t know the word “rape” at that point) he told her that she had to submit to everything her husband wanted her to do, no questions asked.

It is because of Elissa’s brave actions that Warren Jeffs is now behind bars.  She chronicles the trial and everything that led up to it, which in itself was fascinating.  She ends the book with the raid of the YFZ (Youth For Zion) Ranch down in Texas, making this book the most up-to-date and applicable to the headlines in the newspapers, out of any of the polygamy books.

This was an absolutely captivating and stunning story.  If you’re only going to read one book on polygamy, make it this one.  I give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Hava

PS I have His Favorite Wife by Susan Schmidt on my list to read.  I’ll have to read and review that one sometime, so I can get a well-rounded view of the polygamy world.  Each book has been so different from the others, I really feel like I’ve learned something new with each book that I read on the subject.

Sleeping with a Stranger: How I Survived Marriage to a Child Molester by Patricia Wiklund was filed in the 921’s section at the library, which for the non-librarians out there, means that it was labeled as an autobiography.  I saw it while doing check-in (of course - that’s happy hour for a bookaholic like me) and thought that it would be along the lines of A Child Called It, where the author would talk about her life in general, and in particular, what happened in her marriage to the child molester.

That was not at all what the book was.  I’m thinking seriously of asking the library to relabel and categorize it, because it shouldn’t be counted as a 921 at all, but instead a self-help book focused on wives whose husbands are child molesters.

Patricia Wiklund talks about what happened in her own marriage in fairly generic details from page 3 - 14 (the first chapter of the book).  The entire rest of the book is spent quoting other women who went through the same thing she did, talking about the different theories of whether a child molester really can be “cured” or not, and how to work through the whole thing if you’re a spouse of a child molester.

Very occasionally, she’d mention something that’d happened in her own life (this would last for a whole paragraph - maybe!) and then she was back to focusing on others.

I don’t think I would have minded this, if I had known that was what this book was going to be about.  Of course in that case, I wouldn’t have picked it up at all, because I’ve never dealt with child molestation on a personal level - I have no reason to learn how to deal with being married to a child molester, obviously.

While reading it, I didn’t know that was what the book was going to be like, and I kept waiting (in vain) for the author to focus on her own story again.  I read to the end (skimming in parts, I’ll admit) and it never happened.  It was a self-help book, focused on the spouses of child molesters.  Period.

If this is something that you are personally dealing with, then I’d highly recommend this book to you.  I think you’ll find it invaluable, because I don’t personally know of other books focused on this same subject - this is a pretty specialized subject.

Otherwise, I’d skip the book.  There’s not much to interest someone who isn’t dealing with this issue themselves.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Havs

Have you ever read a book because you felt you “had to” as a part of your general education? That’s why I picked up Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan - it seemed like one of those books that I “had to” read, as a citizen of America and all that good stuff.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, I ended up loving the book. I was shocked by how readable it was, and spent the next week telling everyone that they needed to read it too.

This is a 921 (meaning it’s an autobiography) but Alan Greenspan being who he is, the majority of the book focuses on the financial system of the world. The book actually starts out on September 11th, 2001, then jumps back and focuses on his early life, and goes forward in time from there.  In the excerpt below, he’s talking about his first job out of college, where he was charged with finding data and making it accessible to businessmen and union leaders.

I think this passage really spotlights the fundamental gap between me and him, since I’d rather have my teeth extracted with no painkillers than mess with numbers on a regular basis, but that’s why he was Chairman of the Fed and I’m…well, I’m definitely not.

There was no room to work in the library’s crowded stacks, so I would lug armloads of materials to my desk. Usually I’d have to blow the dust off the books. The chief economist would assign the research projects, and in just a few months people began to tab me as a guy who knew all the data. In a sense, that was true.

It became my passion to master all of the knowledge on those shelves. I read about the robber barons; I spent hours over the census of population of 1890; I studied railroad freight-car loadings of that era, trends in short staple cotton prices for the decades after the Civil War, and myriad other details of the vast American economy.

It wasn’t drudgery - far from it. Instead of reading Gone with the Wind, I was happy to immerse myself in “Copper Ore Deposits in Chile.” ~Page 33 of Age of Turbulence

Great for him and America that he was that way, and even better for me that I don’t have to be.

Although I enjoyed reading about his background, the really interesting part for me came when he started talking about dealing with the different presidents. He’s libertarian (meaning, a capitalist first and foremost - most of his book is spent passionately defending capitalism as the best way of life) but his position was nonpolitical in nature, and he tried to stay out of the political spotlight.

His behind-the-scenes look at each of the presidents was an eye-opener for me. The president who seemed to be the most aligned with Greenspan when it came to economic policy was actually Bill Clinton, and Greenspan had heaps of praise for his policies on economic decisions.

He talks briefly about the Monica Lewinsky affair, and says how disappointed he was in that happening, but he didn’t seem to let it affect his judgment on whether or not Clinton made a good president.

Overall, the book was quite a-political, which I really liked, because I hate having one point of view or another forced down my throat when the book is supposed to be about something else entirely. Now if the book is labeled as a political book (like a book from Rush Limbaugh or something) then fine, at least I know it going into the book. When people try to slide their views in subtly, it really drives me nuts.  Greenspan doesn’t do that.

After going through the presidents up to President Bush, and then his eventual retirement from the Federal Board, Greenspan then dives into what he thinks about each region of the world: China, India, Russia, South America, and more. He talks quickly about why the country is where it is, what changes he thinks they need to make to become more prosperous in the future, and what he thinks will actually happen.

To me, this was the most fascinating part of the book. To have someone as knowledgeable as him give a broad overview of a country and its economic policies was engrossing. I was almost late to work several times, because I didn’t want to put the book down.

After all this, the book finally ends up doing what I was worried about all along: It got boring. He gets into the fine details of how the financial world hums along, and even though I know that understanding all of this would make me a much more informed person, it was just too much for my non-math brain. Here’s a quick excerpt - tell me if you understand this:

A detailed calculation by Federal Reserve Board staff employing data from more than 5,000 nonfinancial US corporations for the years 1983 - 2004 found that growth in the sum of deficits of those corporations where capital expenditures exceeded cash flow persistently outpaced the growth in corporate value-added. The sum of surpluses and deficits, disregarding sign, as a ratio to a proxy for corporate value-added exhibits an average annual increase of 3.5% per year.*

To clarify, it says in the footnotes:

*The surpluses (and deficits) are measured as income before extraordinary items, plus depreciation, minus capital expenditures. The proxy for corporate value-added is gross margin, or sales less cost of goods sold. ~ Page 356 of Age of Turbulence

So glad we cleared that up…

Unfortunately, Greenspan goes on in this fashion for several chapters. At first, I tried to understand it, and then I gave up. I am soooo not a math person. I just started skimming until things got interesting again, and they did. The book ended on a great note, and I finished in awe of the knowledge that Greenspan possesses, and also quite sad that the book was finally finished. At 531 pages, I really should have been celebrating its completion, but it was such an interesting book, I wanted to keep learning.

If you have any interest whatsoever in finances, politics, the economy, or just the world in general, you really can’t miss when it comes to this book. Everyone I’ve talked to who has read it thoroughly enjoyed it, so I know I’m not the oddball out here.

Overall, it rates 4.5 out of 5. I wish I could give it higher, but there’s just one too many dry spots.

Havs

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