By EDWARD KOSNER
June 11, 2008
How to Get Rich By Felix Dennis (Portfolio, 291 pages, $25.95)
If Machiavelli sat down at his iMac to confect “The Billionaire Prince,” it might sound remarkably like Felix Dennis’s “How to Get Rich” – without the poetry or the rollicking vulgarity, of course. Bearded and blustery, Mr. Dennis is the English high-school dropout who parlayed a 1960s hippie magazine called Oz and wall-poster tributes to kung fu martyr Bruce Lee into a publishing empire of computer publications and beer-and-boobs lad mags like Maxim that has made him one of the richest men in Britain. He has, as he likes to remind readers, more money than he can possibly count – somewhere between $400 million and $900 million, “I honestly cannot fix a number any closer than that.” Mr. Dennis calls his effort “an anti-self-improvement” book, and he’s telling the truth. “The chances of anyone reading it and then becoming rich are minuscule,” he writes. His basic message is that only those able to turn themselves into monomaniacal workaholics estranged from loved ones and reviled by rivals – or willing to unsheathe their inner monster – can hope to hit the mega jackpot. “Somewhere in the invisible heart of all self-made wealthy men and women,” he says, “is a sliver of razored ice.”
And he can be hilariously mordant about the magazine industry that made his fortune: “It is a business,” he writes, “where our main activity is chopping down millions and millions of trees, flattening the pulp and printing hieroglyphics and images on both sides of it. Then we send the end product out in diesel-guzzling trucks to shops were perhaps 60 percent [about 25% in the U.S.] of them sell to customers. Then we pile the remaining unsold magazines into more diesel-guzzling trucks and take them to a plant where they are either consumed as fuel, buried or shredded or used to make cardboard boxes for refrigerators.”
But beneath the braggadocio and buffoonery, Mr. Dennis’s book is full of cold-hearted advice…
