Saturday, September 29, 2007
An absolutely brutal book review
This is the most humiliating book review I have read in several months of Sundays.
A laid-off Manhattan advertising executive encounters something that passes for ordinary life, writes about it, and reveals far more about himself than he intended:
[The book] is, as the title suggests, about Starbucks, where the author, an older gent named Michael Gates Gill, son of the New Yorker critic Brendan Gill, went to work in an entry-level job out of desperation.
He was desperate because he had lost his “high powered” advertising position at the J. Walter Thompson agency in New York. Which brings us to the scathing indictment: Gill, with the grating babe-in-the-woods persona he adopts in this book, would have us believe that top advertising executives like him have no idea that there are black people in the world and that some of them run small businesses; that every weekday thousands of people gather at places like Grand Central Terminal for a ritual known as rush hour; that an overwhelming majority of lives are lived in the service of train schedules and bill collectors. If the rest of Madison Avenue royalty is as clueless about the real world as Gill makes himself seem in this book, off with their heads.
If you enjoy cringing in embarrassment, read the whole thing.
4 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sat Sep 29, 01:58:00 PM:
There are completely disconnected people like that. I don't feel any sympathy for them though.
Sounds like a lame rehash of the Black Like Me theme from John Griffin, only altering the circumstances a little. Griffin's book was outstanding, this one sounds less so.
By 
, at
Sat Sep 29, 03:13:00 PM:
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Sun Sep 30, 07:53:00 PM:
It's not that far removed from the theme of What's The Matter With Kansas?
By Georg Felis, at
Mon Oct 01, 12:56:00 PM:
Being from Kansas, and having read the book “Whats the matter with Kansas”, I could not help but wonder if there was some other place called Kansas, because nothing in the book resembled where I live. I would presume the same sense of disconnection would come from a New Yorker reading this book.
