Amazon.co.uk Review
Love him or loathe him, you've got to admit it, Richard Branson has drive. And guts. And enough ambition to sink a battleship--or perhaps that should be a jumbo jet--or even a whole company of jumbos if the Virgin Atlantic/British Airways debacle (which takes up a huge chunk of this already huge tome) is anything to go by.
Branson's autobiography makes immensely fascinating reading. Whatever you think of Britain's most famous entrepreneur, the odds are that you will enjoy reading his autobiography. You may snort at descriptions of his "poor" childhood--spent eating bread and dripping while living in a house the majority of us visit on Bank Holidays and attending a "minor" public school. You may groan at memories of early initiative tests: how about being ejected from the family car and told by his mother to find his way home--at the age of four? You may flinch at accounts of his early business days as an unwashed, unshod, hippy magazine publisher living en famille with his staff in the crypt of a West London church. But, all in all, you'll get to understand where the guy's coming from--man.
And, like the man himself, there's no holds barred here. Richard bares his soul, from childhood, school days (cheating at exams), loves and losses (lost one wife when a spot of wife-swapping went drastically wrong--for him), death-defying adventures (yes, the balloons are all there), to the rise and rise of the Virgin empire. His interviews for Student magazine and the early days of Virgin Music read like a chronicle of popular music and culture in the late 20th century. Famous names bounce off every page. Prepare to be enthralled by the life and times of a walking publicity machine. --Carey Green
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Richard Branson is the most notable - certainly the best known - businessman of his generation. The Erroll Flynn of business, he started as an iconoclastic schoolboy, published a radical student magazine, and went on to build an extraordinary empire from which he notoriously takes time off from buying airlines and life-sized train sets for dangerous leisure pursuits such as round-the-world ballooning. This very full autobiography is fascinating, irritating and amusing by turn. Though quite as frank as anyone could expect, it is naturally partial; an outsider will one day no doubt write a more interesting, critical account of Branson's life, but this one is highly entertaining, straight from the mouth of an uncommonly lively horse. (Kirkus UK)
by Sir Richard Branson
by Sir Richard Branson
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