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Good Reading : December January 2008
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word of mouth biography / memoir How Starbucks Saved my Life Michael Gates Gill This is a bizar re book which prompted an internal dialogue as I read it. An inner voice told me I should hate it, laced as it is with hokey homilies and annoying Starbucks pop psychology work jargon where employees are ‘partners’. There was also the lurking suspicion that the book was simply a marketing exercise commissioned by Starbucks. But despite the reservations, I enjoyed this book. It is a modem American fable and the thrust of the story beggars belief: a highly paid ad executive, in the twilight of his career, is fired and abandoned by the system. Unemployable, old, and with no savings, he sits in a Starbucks café one day contemplating the ruin of his life when a beautiful black woman magically offers him a job as a Starbucks waiter, er sorry, partner. The man accepts and his life is miraculously ransfor med. Yes, it sounds corny, but essentially ’s a touching story about the rediscovery of what is really important in life: simple happiness, love etc. A bonus is that the author is the son of Brendan Gill, a writer for the New Yorker when it was at the forefront of American letters, and the book is laced with interesting tales of famous writers and showbusiness luminaries the author met as a boy, through his dad. ★★★★ RG Bantam $34.95 Reviewed by Peter Olszewski Chasing Bohemia : A Year of Living Recklessly in Rio De Janeiro Carmen Michael Ah, such an interesting topic, so many minor irritants. Brazil might be an exotic and colourful country, but Michael’s main technique in conveying its dangerous allure is writing ir ritatingly long sentences. So she goes to the fruit market and buys apples, oranges, mandarins, bananas, tangerines and quinces. She sees people there walk- ing, running, half-running, strolling, strutting, and striding around. On and on it goes until you wonder if she was paid by the comma. Or perhaps she was paid for every time she uses the word ‘ran- dom’? There are points when one can imagine this story was written by ‘Summer Heights High’s Ja’mie King: ‘OH MY GOD! Brazil is so random! And all the guys are soooo hot! But there’s so many povvos!’ Subtitled ‘A Year of Living Recklessly’, this is more like a year of sitting around drinking cocktails. It also includes the story of Michael being wooed by the world’s most obvious conman and suffering a her nia after excessively patting herself on the back for being so much more Brazilian than all those dumb tourists. It did make me want to visit Brazil, however, if only because death by caipirinha seems preferable to this death by paper cuts. ★★ Scribe $32.95 Reviewed by Daniel Herborn Dying: A Memoir Donald Horne and Myfanwy Horne Personal accounts of dying are mostly absent from western literature, presumably due to concerns that the topic is too morbid. But of course the baby boomer generation, which continually redefined literature throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, is now redefining how sickness and dying are viewed and written about in the early twenty-first century. Recently, as baby boomers succumb to serious illness, articles about surviving catastrophic medical events have proliferated in quality magazines. And now that the boomers are dying, they’re writing about it.The first quality example of dead man writing comes from Donald Horne, who, early in his career, redefined how we look at Australia in his classic, The Lucky Country. At the end of his career, and is life, he redefined how we iew dying by writing about his pproaching death in minute nd touching detail. Donald’s passing accounts for only a third of the book. Another third is comprised of the observations of Donald’s dying by wife Myfanwy – and her views, interestingly, are far sadder and more tragic than Donald’s. The final third of the book is made up of Horne’s written ephemera and essays. But Donald’s account of his dying, the raison d’être of this book, is actually quite char ming and gently reminds us that our dying is simply part of our living. ★★★★ RG Penguin/Viking $35.00 Reviewed by Peter Olszewski Treat yourself to the luxury of larger print. Bestselling titles in easy-on-the-eye 14 point type. In bookstores now. Seeing is believing
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