46 Book Review
How Starbucks Saved My Life by Michael Gates Gill
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
December 2021
CULTURE & ARTS
Reviewed by Michael Attard
I
came across this book while browsing. Seeing “Starbucks” in the title immediately caught my attention, and since I like Starbucks, I pulled the book from the shelf. What really piqued my interest was the incongruity of the name of a corporate brand associated with “the saving of life.” “How Multinational Giant Wipes Out Town” would have been a more believable title. I flipped the book over and read the back cover. Actually, the man in the story, including his name, sounded a lot like me, so I bought the book.
to simply fill the pages. But the more I read, I began to see that as he progressed to a new life, he still needed validation that his old life was not bereft of significance. In this way, I do not think that he is any different from anyone else. And it is these images from the past, now seen in a new light, that help Michael transition to his new self.
To be clear, the book is a nonfiction memoir. Yet the story of his troubles touches all the bases for writing an interesting novel. There is career and financial success. As a protagonist, Michael suffers from the fault of arrogance, and this leads him to succumb to scandal, destroy his marriage, and ruin the already precarious relationships he had with his children. His job, which he assumed was on a solid footing, is yanked like a carpet out from under him. Add a serious medical issue and Michael is forced to contemplate whether his sudden trials are not perhaps his comeuppance. The story begins with Michael already in a downward spiral. In an attempt to get a grip on his life, or a sense of his place in the universe, he retreats to the bygone familiarity and comfort of the past by visiting the neighborhood where he grew up. Standing in front of his old home, he reminisces about the day his father had a Steinway grand piano hoisted by crane into the second floor. Throughout the book, Michael goes back years in time and pulls stories seemingly out of thin air and pops them into the present. At first, I thought that most of these were interesting little titbits from the past that he was using to make his story more interesting or
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