Alan Farnham: Forbes Great Success Stories

Wiley

$39.90

Here are some of the people behind the success stories: Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel and the mother of Barbie; salesman extraordinaire Ron Popeil, pioneer and doyen of the "But wait! There's more!" style of selling, who made a fortune selling his O-Matic products (Chop-O-Matic etc); Donald Trump, for heaven's sake.

Strangely compelling and strangely depressing. These are lives writ large, despite their often humble beginnings.

The stories in here are intended to be inspirational: these people have all soared to the top, plummeted like Icarus, then risen like the Phoenix - with their hard-nosed truisms ("Never forget: the world needs you and what you're offering ... I totally eradicated the word failure from my vocabulary ... If you snooze you lose" and so on and on).

Perhaps they might make us long for a time when huge corporations didn't rule the world.