Michael Gates Gill, author of the bestselling How Starbucks Saved My Life will be in Atlanta on Monday, January 18th. Gill is on tour to promote his new book How to Save Your Own Life: 15 Lessons on Finding Hope in Unexpected Places.
Gill’s New York publisher Gotham Books/Penguin has been so proactive in promoting his new book that they’ve even supplied small-tater bloggers such as myself with advance copies of the book. Always a sucker for a free book, I obliged.
Gill’s new book picks up where I assume (no one gave me a complimentary Starbucks book) where his last book left off, with Gill at retirement age happily working as a coffee barista. He’s apparently much more satisfied serving people 20 ounce Starbucks Venti White Chocolate Mochas (580 calories and 15 grams of saturated fat) than he was as a corporate advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, his former life of wealth and prestige that he reminds us of many, many times.
Gill’s new book is a response to the thousands (yes, thousands) of people who have sought his advice (including the actor Michael J. Fox). Thus inspired, Gill has boiled down his advice into 15 lessons/chapters of wisdom that he has gleaned over the past couple of years. Some came from his family like his famous writer-father Brendan Gill of The New Yorker.
In each chapter, Gill keeps his teachings simple with a lot of one-sentence paragraphs.
But if the topic is complicated ---such as what it means to be a late bloomer -- he might expand his thoughts to two or even three sentences. A good example is when he explains that the term late bloomers originates from “the garden term used to describe flowers that bloom late in the season.”
If you still can’t get the message, Gill drops in a few helpful adages at the end of each chapter such as “Your life is like the weather: You can talk about it a lot, but in the most profound way, you can never completely control it.”
Gill has a kitchen-sink, percolating writing style as he tosses in passages from the Bible, verses of songs, verses of songs that he wrote himself, the poetry of William Butler Yeats, lines from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and proverbial clichés such as “laughter is the best medicine.” I am guessing his scattershot prose style can partially be attributed to his taking advantage of one of his employee “perks” (his quotes, not mine) that include a weekly free pound of high octane coffee.
I think what surprises me most about this book is that effort that went into bringing it fruition. In the acknowledgements, Gill thanks his publisher, his editor, his Hollywood agent, (there are efforts to make the Starbucks book into a movie), his publicity people and his agent slash creative catalyst (I need one of those) for “publishing books that help people."
With all this marketing and brainpower, I am surprised no one remembered to include Lesson 16, the most important lesson of all when it comes to managing your time and setting priorities: Avoid crappy self-help books.” I guess after reading How to Save Your Own Life, that message is understood
If nothing else, Gill's book gave the two of us opportunities to have a bit of fun.
Posted by: Jane | January 31, 2010 at 10:40 PM