Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Good entertainment

Customer Rating:

I read this book for the sake of entertainment. I am a strongly numerate and literate person who works extremely hard but I am not the entrepreneur type. Reading this book which was well written (the author is a poet as well as an entrepreneur) was entertaining, however, and told me many things that I had long suspected about top business people. I am more the academic/professional/adminstrator type than the entrepreneur or sales type and have no intention of trying to get rich as opposed to merely comfortable. I think that the author is honest enough to admit that most people will fail in business, that being rich doesn't always make one happy and that there is a price to pay in trying to become rich (the author hints at a moral price) over and above the sheer hard slog involved. Good for entertainment which is all I read it for.

How Felix Dennis got rich

Customer Rating:

Books like this are excellent. Not the subject matter necessarily (although this subject matter more than most seems to fall into this category) but books that are cheap enough to boost your Amazon purchase over the free delivery threshold without breaking the bank! I didn't like this book though. Let's get something clear straight up: There is no such thing as a get rich manual of any kind. People make fortunes in many different ways and to be able to bottle and sell their methods on so that a person may copy them would be almost impossible. So if you are drawn to this book by the promise of untold riches in the title then forget it because there isn't anything like that, either here or anywhere else. There are many excellent books out there though that for example will teach you how to manage your money properly so that you may accumulate wealth over time and these should be separated from the likes of How To Get Rich, which is merely one man's pet fancy shamefully painted up as a self help manual in order to sell more copies. After all, had he released it as "Felix Dennis, My Story", 90% of the population would have said "who?". There you have it, this is nothing more than a Felix Dennis autobiography disguised as a get rich manual and it isn't very good for several reasons: Mr. Dennis is deliberately insulting to just about everyone. He does this in an attempt to be amusing and refreshingly forthright but he just comes over as a complete donkey. He even tries to cover this up by telling us that because he is rich and we are not then he must be right. It must have been so long since he rubbed shoulders with any of us peasants because he absolutely fails to acknowledge that anyone with less than £5 million in the bank actually exists. He even has the nerve to suggest anyone with 'only' £5 million to £20 million in the bank should be classed as comfortably poor. He thinks that because he is rich he can write god-awful kiddie rhymes and call himself a poet. Whether you love or hate Paris Hilton even she would be the first to admit that any 'artistic' skill she attempts to demonstrate has been made possible entirely by her access to large amounts of money. But Mr. Dennis is under the delusion that he is gifted and even seems to think that this is another reason why he is wealthy. J'acuse Monsieur Dennis - ditch all your money, change your name to Fred Skint and then try to get your cheesy poems published. He is incredibly proud of getting where he is by being obnoxious. We all know you need to be tough and thick skinned to get on in business but do we really need to celebrate that fact? I can't see how announcing that his business meetings often involved a few hundred grams of Columbian marching powder and a dozen 'professional' ladies is going to get him that pat on the back that he seems to so desperately crave. I'm incredibly jealous that he is rich and I'm not! The good stuff? He is correctly extremely dismissive of venture capitalists, whom disappointingly the TV show Dragons Den has made to look like loveable rogues but what they are in fact are the worst kind of vultures. Without actually creating anything of use to society, they will take any business, bleed it dry for entirely their own profit and dump it without a single thought for how many lives they ruin. Mr. Dennis has rightly pointed this out. He also can't write very well and so strangely this makes the book very easy to read quickly. A lot of these types of books only have about 20 pages of material and so pad it out as far as possible. For example why use 1 word when 30 will do the job just as well? this is refreshingly absent from How To Be Rich. If you want to read something along similar lines but with a bit of actual insight though then I'd suggest 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' by Robert T. Kiyosaki or the proper 'How to Be Rich' by J. Paul Getty. Neither of them will make you rich either but they're a damned sight more enjoyable to read and so you can do yourself a favour then and skip this one.

Felixe is a living legend

Customer Rating:

Felix Dennis is the first person to lay bare how difficult it is to become rich and how it will ruin your friendships and make you selfish and paranoid and so many other things - and yet in this frank account of how he amassed his £750M fortune I'm only encouraged to keep going and to get there myself. A frank and realistic account of a great life story that continues with Felix's poetry today - the mans a legend!

Read between the lines

Customer Rating:

I bought this book in an airport departure lounge and was hooked before I boarded the plane. If you take this book at face value then you're missing the point. If you think reading this book is going to get you rich then you're missing the point. What this book will tell you is whether you are the kind of individual who can make the sacrifices required to become rich. Anybody who lusts at the idea of being stupidly wealthy should read this book, and after finishing it ask themselves if they really have the dedication to follow it through. Frankly (and I think Mr. Dennis would agree) there is no shame if you haven't. But I know he would also agree that you're not going to make a penny just reading books. So get out there and do it.

truthful

Customer Rating:

Wow. Dennis certainly spells out the cost of getting rich: you need persistence, tunnel-vision and relentless drive, you must sacrifice ALL leisure time, relationships and security. Most of the other get-rich books I've read try to make it seem much easier than it really is, glossing over the vital information Dennis provides. Dennis is so much more truthful than the likes of Kiyosaki, Trump and Robbins. I am now, at last, prepared to settle for comfortable because - like the silent majority - I never want to become obsessed, to have my life taken over. But, if someone is already an addictive personality, why not choose getting rich instead of whatever substance or process they're currently abusing? However, it's also worth reading "The Millionaire Mind" and "Automatic Millionaire" for other takes on getting rich. Those books detail gentler, proven ways of becoming comfortable (a few million) as opposed to the obsession required to become really rich (tens or hundreds of millions).