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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
