A welcome update from an irrepressible iconoclast who prides himself on “effervescence, cheekiness and great service.”
A sequel to the business magnate’s 1998 bestseller, Losing My Virginity.
Branson (The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership, 2014, etc.) describes his rise in the past two decades as a global entrepreneur whose Virgin Group brand now controls more than 400 companies in sectors ranging from media and entertainment to travel and financial services. His brisk narrative celebrates life as “one big adventure,” offering vivid scenes of his personal life, his colorful, often irreverent business practices, and his wide-ranging philanthropy to advance health, help the environment, and stop the exploitation of children. “I do most things on emotion,” he writes, allowing that his risks are calculated and managed by carefully selected staff. Much of the book details the deals behind his work in space flight and other areas, where he brings “passion, know-how and determination” to bear on his disruption of existing industries. A man who prizes humor, Branson recounts many of his publicity antics, from dangling from a crane in Times Square to hiding in overhead baggage compartments on Virgin aircraft, lowering himself to ask boarding passengers if he can be of service. He deems entrepreneurship, which he encourages in many forums, to be “our natural state…like playfulness,” and his many stories of vetting new business ideas, learning the lay of the land, and acting decisively illustrate how he has been pursuing that life since founding Student magazine at age 16. His work with The Elders, a group of leaders working to solve global conflicts, begun by Branson, Nelson Mandela, and others, underscores his keen interest in humanitarian work. The author also provides revealing anecdotes about Paul Allen, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Kate Moss, Donald Trump, Al Gore, Rupert Murdoch, and others.
A welcome update from an irrepressible iconoclast who prides himself on “effervescence, cheekiness and great service.”Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1942-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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