Sam Wyly exemplifies the type of businessman for whom the term "larger than life" was coined. If his risk-taking life were made into a Hollywood movie, the critics would complain about the highly unlikely nature of the activities portrayed. Going from Louisiana farmer’s son to billionaire entrepreneur is one thing. But to earn several fortunes, in fields as diverse as steakhouses and computer software, represents quite another.

Nevertheless, Wyly wears all these hats, and many others as well, comfortably and convincingly in his memoir "1,000 Dollars & An Idea” (Newmarket Press, 2008). The cover teaser alone -- “What I learned creating and building University Computing, Sterling Software, Maverick Capital, Bonanza Steakhouse, Michaels Stores, and Green Mountain Energy" -- would exhaust the biographical bandwidth of virtually any other business person on the scene today. For Wyly, that’s the tip of the iceberg.

He accomplished these feats while maintaining a lifelong focus on family -- his brother Charles worked alongside him on many of his ventures. He also hung onto a sense of humor well-evidenced in these pages. The result is a highly readable book that imparts sterling -- no pun intended -- insights into the practical aspects of building businesses, while also containing lessons no less valuable on the topic of living a worthwhile life.

The book begins in a Louisiana barbershop, where his cotton planter father goes for a straight-razor shave and bull session with other local farmers. There, literally at his father’s knee, Wyly irrevocably learned the value of managing risk. In this case, the experience was his father’s failure to fully hedge with crop insurance during what turned out to be a disastrous year for agriculture in that part of the Mississippi Delta. That misstep forced the family to sell its comfortable home in town and live in a cabin with no running water on the farm.

Another lesson, taught to him by his mother, involved a savings account where he learned how a few dollars, given time and compound interest and the young Wyly’s earnings from construction and oil field jobs, could turn into enough to fund a college education. After absorbing more lessons about toughness and passion in the truly hard-knocks classroom of a high school football state championship game, Wyly went on to study journalism at Louisiana Tech and, later, the University of Michigan, for an MBA.

The emphasis on family runs throughout. And for Wyly, family means more than just parents and siblings. He tracks his ancestry back to Scottish-Irish immigrants arriving in the New World in 1657, recounting the exploits of one forebear who died at the Alamo and others who played significant roles in the Confederacy. “Roots are good,” he observes at the end of this genealogical section.

But being forward-looking and innovative is good too. And after graduating -- he switched from journalism to accounting before graduation -- Wyly’s imagination was captured by the idea of becoming a sales rep for what he considered the prototypical modern American enterprise, IBM Corp. Then, as he puts it, “fate intervened” with an offer of a scholarship to graduate business school at Michigan.

Much of Wyly’s life after business school is fairly well-known -- how he became a top salesman for IBM and Honeywell, befriended Ross Perot, and eventually decided to start a business providing data processing services to Dallas companies. Less familiar is the tale of all the adversity he suffered in his first venture, including the challenge of loosening the iron hold IBM had on the computer business at the time. Suffice to say he succeeded and, a few years after starting University Computing, took it public and earned his first million dollars at 30 years of age.

Many, if not most, people would have settled down to enjoy the fruits of their labor about then. Not Wyly. In successive entrepreneurial ventures he took on the established data transmission oligopoly, the nascent software industry, the notoriously fickle restaurant business, arts and crafts retailing, venture investing and, in a presumably final burst of 21st-Century vision, clean energy.

Many of these ventures remain viable years later. Even University Computing, the first, long-vanished in a corporate acquisition, remains in the software powering many of the world’s large business computers. Green Mountain Energy, the latest, is far from the least significant. It is today the largest provider of clean energy in the country.

In summing up this vibrant and varied life, Wyly recounts meetings and associations with people from football great Roger Staubach to broadcasting legend Jim Lehrer. He reserves his most tender recollections for his family, including his long-time partner and brother, Charles, and his father, who eventually became a newspaper publisher and helped give Wyly the writing bug.

Wyly promises this is not the end of those authorial aspirations, describing his next book as an essay on the implementation of a carbon tax system that could, he says, help pay for Social Security. If it holds half the entertainment and information value of his first, the wait will be worth it.