Working-Class Heroes -- Tall and Grande

HOW STARBUCKS SAVED MY LIFE A Son of Privilege Learns To Live Like Everyone Else By Michael Gates Gill | Gotham. 268 pp. $13

Michael Gates Gill's birthright earned him a life of ease and opportunity. As a son of the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, he brushed shoulders with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, Jacqueline Kennedy, Brooke Astor and Ezra Pound (at whom he once threw apples). A fellow member of Yale's Skull & Bones society secured him his first job, at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. But when Gill reached his early 60s, he fell into a tailspin: He'd lost his job, separated from his wife (after fathering a child with his paramour) and was found to have a benign brain tumor. "I was facing the reality," he writes, "of literally not being able to support myself."

But as the title of his book How Starbucks Saved My Life makes clear, all was not lost. One lucky day, while Gill was sipping one of his "last remaining treats," a latte at his favorite coffee shop, the manager asked him if he wanted a job. So began Gill's journey into the minimum-wage world, where he found unexpected gratification cleaning toilets, hauling trash and, after working his way up the ladder, making lattes. "Starbucks had freed me to be me," he gushes. Gill's breezy book is filled with many such Mitch Albom-like observations. One wonders, though, how Gill's outlook has shifted now that his bestselling account has been optioned for a film with Tom Hanks in the starring role.

STEEL DRIVIN' MAN John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend By Scott Reynolds Nelson | Oxford. 214 pp. $14.95

The tale of the mighty martyr John Henry has inspired workers, writers, artists and comic-book authors alike; his name was even emblazoned on a line of clothing for big and tall men. But who was the real John Henry? In Steel Drivin' Man, Scott Reynolds Nelson goes to great lengths to distinguish man from myth, sorting through the archives, driving his car along the routes Henry might have taken.

Though the written record is scant, Nelson manages to piece together a portrait of Henry -- a black convict laborer who died drilling railroad tunnels -- offering an illuminating course in Reconstruction history along the way. Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, approaches his subject with both enthusiasm -- John Henry was "short and had been born in New Jersey!" -- and gravitas. The story of John Henry, he writes, "is a story of the injuries that hide in tunnels, mines, and cotton factories, unacknowledged, ignored, and fatal as a bullet." Part biography and part cultural history, this slender volume, nicely illustrated with maps and photographs, is at heart a detective story by a sleuth with a PhD and a healthy dose of skepticism.

From Our Previous Reviews

· NPR listeners may recall the harrowing tale of Howard Dully, who at age 12 was given an "ice-pick" lobotomy at the behest of his stepmother. In his memoir, My Lobotomy (Three Rivers, $13.95), Dully, with Charles Fleming, shows an admirable "measure of peace and understanding" as he recalls this defining event, wrote Juliet Wittman.

· In Brother I'm Dying (Vintage, $14.95), a National Book Critics Circle award winner, Edwidge Danticat uses "the charms of a storyteller and the authority of a witness to evoke the political forces and personal sacrifices behind her parents' journey to this country and her uncle's decision to stay behind," wrote Bliss Broyard.

· Garrison Keillor's novel Pontoon (Penguin, $14) "abounds with good-humored satire, lyrical evocations of Keillor's beloved Midwestern community and characters as believable as your next-door neighbors," wrote Howard Frank Mosher.

· "A relatively brief narrative that can be read in a weekend," Yaroslav Trofimov's The Siege of Mecca (Anchor, $14.95) highlights the importance to radical Islam of the 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca, wrote Thomas W. Lippman.

Nora Krug is Book World's paperback columnist.