Walking In Wuhan

I passed this one on the biography shelf a couple times before deciding to check it out. A memoir by Michael Gates Gill, it details his fall from grace and ultimate retribution as a barista at Starbucks. Throughout his life Gill had everything given to him. He attended Yale, got his first job through his father's connections and ended up being a bigwig at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, which coined the "few good men" line for the Marines.

But when Gill turns 53, he's fired from the company, has an affair, fathers a child out of wedlock, divorces and learns that he has a slow-growing tumor in his brain. Down to his last few pennies, Gill, now 64, gets offered a job by Crystal, a 28-year-old African American Starbucks manager.

The book then documents Gill's "awakening" as he tries to put his life back together working at Starbucks. To illustrate this point, Gill makes several mentions of his bathroom cleaning responsibilities, because, after all, you don't really learn humility until you've cleaned up somebody else's poo.

Gill often references Crystal's race and those of his co-workers who are predominately African American. Though this seems like a logical plot line, Gill just mentions it tangentially throughout the book. All we learn is that he's white, used to be rich and he's working in an uncomfortable situation.

Throughout the book Gill sprinkles in little anecdotes, some good, some boring. Gill's father, a big player at the New Yorker, rubbed elbows with Truman Capote and others in the Manhattan literary scene. Gill himself met Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona, Spain, learning how Papa actually got that famous scar on his forehead: he took a skylight to the face after a drinking bender.

While the premise of the book seems good enough -- I mean, who doesn't like stuffy overpaid executives being put on their asses -- Gill doesn't go much into his own emotions and it reads more like a 300-page literary venti BJ for Starbucks. Gill remarks several times that he's shocked that Starbucks employees are called partners and that managers always ask if a partner will perform a simple task like taking out the trash. While a story like this is a bit tired, I never felt like Gill actually got past the, "wow, I'm working at Starbucks and this is kind of hard" to get to how it actually affected him.

If you see Starbucks as a corporate juggernaut that takes advantage of little farmers in Costa Rica, this might not be the book for you. But if you want a quick, easy read that's mildly entertaining, Gill's memoir might be worth a look. If you pass, you can always check it out in theaters. Tom Hanks' production company bought the rights to the movie and is reportedly doing a film adaptation of the book with Hanks starring as Gill.