book review steve jobs

Book Review

Book review: 'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson

Review of walter isaacson's biography of steve jobs.

By Laura June

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Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is in some ways another product created from the mind of its subject. Though Jobs was insistent that he wouldn’t interfere with the writing of the book (and in fact he seems not to have read any part of it), he hand-picked Isaacson to lay down his legacy for all to see. Why he chose him is not surprising: Isaacson’s biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are engrossing, epic, and readable studies of men who changed history. That Steve Jobs saw himself in this light (and such august company) is neither shocking nor unjustified. And while Isaacson never shies away from Jobs’s often vitriolic temper (and indeed he sometimes seems to dwell on it to make his point), it is clear that in some respects, Steve Jobs is a book told through the often discussed "reality distortion field" of Steve Jobs himself: though other opinions or sides to a story are presented, Steve always has the last, blunt word.

Given the unprecedented access to Jobs and his blessing to interview those close to him presents the reader with a vast and exceedingly complex — but also incredibly consistent — portrait of the man who created Apple and some of the most important technology products of this century. In many ways, the Jobs of the early ’80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of the book, picking apart his plans to build a yacht that he knew he would likely never see to completion. Jobs, at least according to this tale, didn’t evolve so much as he forced the world around him to do so. Isaacson’s mastery of the form is evident throughout, and he weaves the tale of Jobs’s life deftly.

For technology enthusiasts and those who followed Steve Jobs’s life as though he were Bob Dylan, the biography reinforces the previously known timeline. Jobs’s own admission early in the process with Isaacson that he didn’t "have any skeletons" in his "closet that can’t be allowed out" is largely true (Isaacson, xx). There are no shocking revelations, but the nuance brought to the events by the wide array of characters Isaacson spent time with, and Jobs’s candid and original perspective, never fail to bring well-known events into sharp and personal focus. One example which was well-documented in the media at the time and which gets several pages of attention in the book is the issue of the iPhone 4′s antenna problems. The story, as told in the book, is significant for a few reasons. First, the book reveals that the band of steel around the edge of the phone was never a big hit with Apple’s engineers, who warned that it could cause reception problems. But Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs, living deep in the "reality distortion field" which is repeatedly referred to in the book (and which Jobs’s wife more strikingly terms "magical thinking") insisted that the engineers could figure out how to make it work, to the point that they (Ive and Jobs) even resisted putting a clear coating of varnish on the band to make problems less likely. Secondly, when problems did, in fact, arise, the book makes clear how personally Jobs took the entire situation, going so far as to adamantly suggest that Apple simply ignore the issue, because in his mind, there was no problem, saying, "Fuck this, it’s not worth it" (Isaacson, 521). Only when Tim Cook implored him to face facts did Jobs decide to hold a press conference and offer solutions.

Likewise, it is almost amusing and even a bit sad to read of Jobs’s depression and anger on the evening following the debut of the iPad. Isaacson was by then, somewhat embedded in the Jobs household, and he notes that "as we gathered in his kitchen for dinner, he paced around the table calling up emails and web pages on his iPhone." Jobs told him, "I got about eight hundred email messages in the last twenty-four hours. Most of them are complaining. There’s no USB cord! There’s no this, no that. Some of them are like, ‘Fuck you, how can you do that?’ I don’t usually write people back, but I replied, ‘Your parents would be so proud of how you turned out.’ And some don’t like the iPad name, and on and on. I kind of got depressed today. It knocks you back a bit" (Isaacon, 495). In this and every previous or future launch, Jobs took the products, and their reception, very personally. In every phase of development, from inception to advertisements, he was a dictator, and, as the book underlines quite clearly, people who reacted badly or were underwhelmed simply didn’t get it. The book is rife with such personal perspectives of what are hallowed occurrences in the timeline of Jobs and Apple.

Jobs’s many achievements are tallied in detail, and while they are well known — the Macintosh, Pixar, the iMac, the iPhone, the iPad — it has only been previously assumed that Jobs was closely involved. Now all of his interactions with Apple’s products are truly exposed, in great, painstaking detail. That Jobs was exhaustively involved from beginning to end in the creation of these products and companies — even during the years in which he was gravely ill — is a testament to his work ethic, his creativity, and his genius. While Steve Jobs never shies away from turning a critical eye on its subject, it rightfully gives much credit to Jobs where it is due. People have long pointed out that Jobs could be an "asshole," and while the book never outright denies such a description, the sheer volume of his achievements and creations often puts the erratic and childish behavior into soft focus. In fact, the book seems to suggest that Jobs’s fantastic career was born out of his harsh, demanding attitude, rather than in spite of it. "I don’t think I run roughshod over people," Jobs told Isaacson, "but if something sucks, I tell people to their face. It’s my job to be honest. I know what I’m talking about, and I usually turn out to be right. That’s the culture I tried to create. We are brutally honest with each other, and anyone can tell me they think I am full of shit and I can tell them the same" (Isaacson, 568-569). Rather than exposing Jobs an "asshole," the biography presents, front to back, a human being who was essentially incapable of being phony, even if doing so would make him appear better to others.

The book also emphasizes, in anecdotes that probably aren’t totally surprising, Jobs’s belief, from the beginning of his career to the end of it, that everything should be (and was if possible), in his control. This meant not just making hardware and software into a closed ecosystem, but also controlling what could be done with the actual products once purchased. The stubborn surety that he knew what was right for himself and everyone else famously resulted in Macs and iPhones which were hard to open up and hack (even adding special screws to the latter to make it more difficult), and in the fact that the iPad wouldn’t display Flash. It also resulted, however, in Jobs stubbornly and often refusing to eat (even when sick), in a belief that being vegan meant he didn’t have to shower, and in a resistance to allow his doctors to remove the cancerous tumor on his colon for nine months in 2003.

Jobs’s managerial style (or lack of one), had been previously well-documented after his ouster from Apple, but the biography is probably at its harshest when describing his various working relationships with other people. We are presented with personal accounts of a well-known volatility that is increasingly shocking, sometimes delusional, and always, in the mind of its subject, justified. One of the true revelations of the book is that Steve Jobs cried — a lot, and in the presence of his co-workers. From the earliest days of his career when he cried to Steve Wozniak’s father Jerry about getting Woz to come work at Apple full time, he broke down in tears regularly when frustrated, when cornered, when happy or touched, and when angry. Though his return to Apple did seem to bring some temperance and evenness to his management efforts, Jobs never stopped openly crying when emotion overwhelmed him.

The sections where Bill Gates — who was sometimes an insider and sometimes not — weighs in, are variously the most touching, sometimes the most interesting, and often do the most to underline the great chasm of difference there was between the two personalities. While Jobs avoids branding him with his favorite and oft-used title "bozo," Gates, in this tale, truly doesn’t get it a lot of the time, but he gets that he doesn’t get it. On the success of the iPad, Gates tells Isaacson, "Here I am, merely saving the world from malaria and that sort of thing, and Steve is still coming up with amazing new products," adding, "Maybe I should have stayed in that game" (Isaacson, 553).

Throughout the book, Jobs is incredibly and sometimes amusingly cutting about various friends, former colleagues, business associates, and even celebrities. Many people, in his view (including but not limited to John Mayer, President Obama, Google, and Rupert Murdoch) were constantly "blowing it." He makes it clear that grudges held could often be permanent. When speaking of Jon Rubinstein, a former Apple executive who helped give birth to the iPod and was then head of Palm, Jobs admits to having emailed Bono, a Palm investor, to complain when the company began trying to make an iPhone competitor. Bono replied that his remarks were akin to "the Beatles ringing up because Herman and the Hermits have taken one of their road crew" (Isaacson, 459). "The fact that they [Palm] completely failed salves that wound," Jobs says (Isaacson, 460).

Jobs perspective that certain things "sucked" could often be influenced by other factors. For example, it’s hard to tell if Jobs truly thought that Android is "crap," or if he says it because he was involved in a lengthy battle against Google over patent infringement. What emerges from the Android discussion, however, is that Jobs passionately believed that it was a stolen product. Isaacson was with Jobs the week Apple filed its lawsuit against Google, when Jobs was the "angriest he’d ever seen him."

"Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.’ Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products — Android, Google Docs — are shit" (Isaacson, 511-512). In fact, there are few people and companies Jobs sets his sights on who don’t fail to cut the mustard on many levels. Notable exceptions are the Beatles (who Jobs talks about at length in one of the most insightful sections of the book), his wife Laurene, and Jony Ive.

Though none of the Beatles weigh in on Jobs, both Laurene and Ive do, and Ive in particular seems to grapple with Jobs’s personality, telling Isaacson "He’s a very, very sensitive guy. That’s one of the things that make his antisocial behavior, his rudeness, so unconscionable" (Isaacson, 462). Ive is significant to the book in other ways, as Jobs’s main creative brother-in-arms, and, as the story progresses, it is clear that both men struggled with the idea of a post-Jobs Apple. For nearly the entire latter half of the book, and much of Jobs’s "phase two" at Apple, his health was a near constant concern for those closest to him, and Ive was in that inner-circle. When Jobs returned from a two-month stay in Memphis in May 2009 following his liver transplant, Ive and Cook were there to meet him and his wife on the tarmac. Both Ive and Jobs reported feeling the same way — Ive was "devastated" and "underappreciated" by media stories questioning the ability of Apple to innovate without Jobs , while Jobs was somewhat miffed at Cook’s earnings report call where he suggested that Apple could do just that. "He didn’t know whether to be proud or hurt that it might be true," Issacson writes. "There was talk that he might step aside and become chairman rather than CEO. That made him all the more motivated to get out of his bed, overcome the pain, and start taking his restorative walks again" (Isaacson, 488). The book thus is oddly positioned in that its subject, near the end of the story, is well aware that he is very likely near the end of his career, and indeed, he tells Isaacson on their last meeting, "I’ve done all that I can do" (Isaacson, 559).

In that respect, Jobs the man is consistent throughout, expressing little regret or dissatisfaction with himself, except for his repeated wish that he had spent more time with his children, who, he says, were his main motivation for cooperating with and encouraging that a biography be written at all. In a world where people and media will pay actual money for one glimpse of a dying and frail CEO, Steve Jobs will not be the final book on the man, but it will be the only one told largely in his words, and the only one in which he had the final say on its cover. All the other books will no doubt be written by bozos who blow it.

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Reading the Best Biographies of All Time

Review of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

26 Friday Apr 2019

Posted by Steve in Business

≈ 2 Comments

Apple Computer , biographies , book reviews , Pulitzer Prize nominee , Steve Jobs , Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson’s “ Steve Jobs ” was published in the fall of 2011, three weeks after Jobs died at the age of 56. Isaacson is an author, journalist and former CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin , Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger (a book for which he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination). His most recent biography “ Leonardo da Vinci ” was published in 2017.

“Steve Jobs” is an authorized biography of its idiosyncratic and complex subject. Isaacson received significant assistance from Jobs during his final years of life (primarily in the form of interviews and access to family photographs) but also from more than 100 of his family, friends, colleagues and competitors. But, so far as I can tell, Jobs never reviewed the book in draft form and did not live to see it published.

Far from being a hagiographic tribute to Jobs, though, Isaacson’s biography strips bare the multifaceted founder of Apple Computer. And Jobs quickly proves a perfect biographical subject: he is at once brilliant, narcissistic, intuitive, controlling, idiosyncratic and, occasionally, astonishingly cruel. The author fully dissects his persona – genius and flaws – with considerable skill.

Isaacson’s literary style lacks the erudite sophistication exhibited by some biographies, but his narrative – which often feels oddly informal – is accessible by anyone. And rather than creating an intricate or complicated story, Isaacson glues together hundreds of snippets, anecdotes, quotes and short stories from Jobs’s life to form a fluid, engrossing narrative devoid of unnecessary details or tangents.

The 571 pages of text are almost continually entertaining, engaging and utterly revealing. There are countless enjoyable chapters and passages including many which explore his personal life. But the heart of the book follows Jobs through his eventful two-part career at Apple. Hardcore technology enthusiasts may find Isaacson’s understanding (or explanation) of technology issues too simplistic, but for most readers the level sophistication is appropriate.

Unfortunately, while Isaacson does an admirable job uncovering Job’s maddening contradictions, he is less tenacious about fully unraveling them. As a result, readers never quite know what to think of an allegedly anti-materialistic “hippie” who shunned furniture and frequently greeted clients while barefoot…but drove a Porsche and owned a yacht.

In addition, Isaacson’s writing can be uneven – it occasionally proves deeply insightful and analytical but, more often, seems a bit breezy and carefree. At its core, however, this biography is a fascinating and well-organized collection of titillating tales which reveals his eccentricities but can never quite diagnose what makes Jobs tick . It is possible, of course, that the forces which drove Jobs are simply impenetrable.

Overall, Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” proves an interesting and well-balanced review of the life of one of the greatest (and most inscrutable) entrepreneurs of this generation. While Isaacson’s biography cannot fully explain Jobs’s curious contradictions it is extremely successful in highlighting his faults, flaws and quirks as well as his extraordinary genius through a free-flowing and engaging narrative.

Overall rating: 4 stars

2 thoughts on “Review of “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson”

July 18, 2019 at 9:54 am

This was one of the easiest to follow biographies I have ever read, similar to reading a magazine profile (an extremely lengthy one). It was also, quite simply, an enjoyable book.

As you said, Isaacson did a very good job covering the complex and hypocritical character that was Steve Jobs. His writing brought the man alive in my head which is a key component in any biography (the ability to pull up the video clips mentioned also helps with this). The main drawback is that Isaacson was unable to adequately insert his own analysis of Jobs and Jobs’ evolution throughout the text. I think this would have been particularly relevant in the chapters featuring his time at NeXT where he overcame significant failures and flipped them into a triumphant return to Apple.

Overall, this is a fantastic book for anyone, especially those interested in the computer industry, Apple or Steve Jobs himself and I would highly recommend it. However, those who do heavier hitting material should know that this is a work geared towards the mass-market, which is probably the way Jobs would want it to be.

July 18, 2019 at 9:59 am

Couldn’t have said it better myself. And my experience with Isaacson’s bio of Jobs leaves me really looking forward to his biography of Einstein which is currently on my schedule for the Sept/Oct timeframe. And at some point thereafter I’ll be reading his biography of Ben Franklin…

Walter Isaacson “Steve Jobs” – book review

There are many adjectives that I would use to describe Steve Jobs – „dull” is not one of them.

I don’t think I would have had the patience to read a biography of this length if I hadn’t been listening to it on Audible. I listened to it over a few months, dipping in at leisure, and taking breaks when it got to be a bit too much.

Steve Jobs had asked Walter Isaacson to become his biographer. Jobs was seriously ill at the time, but he didn’t like to admit as much- neither to the public nor to himself. Isaacson had only written about great dead men (Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein). It had seemed arrogant of Jobs to request the same treatment. But Isaacson only agreed to the task on the condition that he would be allowed free reign over whom he interviews and what he asks.

Isaacson’s magisterial biography captures many of the contradictions that marked Jobs ’s life. He was given up for adoption by his parents, who insisted that his new parents had to be able to send him to university. He was brought up in Silicon Valley at the time when things were just beginning to get interesting. As a teenager, Jobs called up the co-founder of HP to get parts for his school project.

Jobs saw himself as a counterculture rebel. The company name „apple” comes from a commune he lived in: an apple orchard. He famously refused to shower for weeks and subjected himself to fasting or strange diet regimes (for example, eating only apples or carrots) for weeks at a time. But despite all his overt hippie obsessions, he became the embodiment of American capitalism.

On the one hand, he was all for innovation, on the other very much a believer in closed systems that users cannot customize.

He got fired from the company he started. Abandoned as a child by his birth parents, he first refused to acknowledge his first-born child, Lisa, and then he named one of his computers after her.

A perfectionist in the smallest details, he divided his world into shitheads and geniuses. Often one person could morph from one to the other in a question of minutes.

His opponents accused him of knowing nothing about computers. Many would say that one of his best ideas was the “click-and-point” mouse idea, copied from Xerox labs. When Microsoft was sued by Apple for purportedly stealing the idea behind the “click-and- point” cursor, Bill Gates apparently said

„Well, Steve I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found that you had already stolen it’

There is something everyone agreed on: Jobs was obsessed with design.

Jobs ’s childhood suburban home was designed by Joseph Eichler and Jobs believed that Eichler’s focus on beauty and simplicity for the masses profoundly affected his life. Another story Jobs was fond of telling was about his dad’s garage. His Dad showed him that a good craftsman always takes care that a product was beautiful inside and out. He credited his Dad’s inspiring him with his perfectionism when designing Apple’s factories. Jobs’s passion for design is evident in his friendship and respect for creatives such as John Lasseter (Executive Producer, Pixar) and Jony Ive (Chief Designer Officer, Apple).

Names like these are a crucial part of this book. We learn that Gates originally designed excel only for the Mac. We learn that Ella Fitzgerald sang at Jobs ’s thirtieth birthday. Apple’s cooperation with U2-lead Bono and Jobs to become friends. I had never realized that Jobs had gone out with Joan Baez. Though most of his friends suspected it was because she, in turn, had slept with Bob Dylan, whom Jobs idealized.

There is a lot of factual research that has gone into this book, but it really comes into its own in the realm of the anecdote. One of my personal favorites is when Apple was accused of censorship for banning apps with porn. Jobs was accused of being a tyrant.

Jobs response was characteristic “People do have the freedom to watch porn. They can buy an android.”

The book is not just the story of Steve Jobs . It’s a story of the revolution in the tech industry. It is thorough, and at times digressive and exhausting but like Steve Jobs himself- never dull.

Steve Jobs : The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

Title: Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

Author: Walter Isaacson

Publisher: Abacus

Genre: Biography, Business

First Publication: 2011

Language: English

Book Summary: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years – as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues – this is the acclaimed, internationally bestselling biography of the ultimate icon of inventiveness, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson tells the story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies,music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Although Steve Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written, nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Steve Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I knew that I would enjoy this book after reading the first few pages, but it far exceeded my expectations. I love learning the history behind products that I am familiar with, and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson lays out the history of every product Steve Job’s is responsible for.

“Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Laurene Powell, Jobs’ wife, told Isaacson that she didn’t want her husband’s life whitewashed, and he certainly didn’t. Along with Steve the brilliant innovator who knew how to bring together an A-list team of loyal employees, we get Steve Jobs the rude man who will proclaim a product or food or wedding invitation as “sh*t” and then walk away with a clear conscience; Steve Jobs the man who has no qualms about crying in front of others if he doesn’t get his way or is overburdened; Steve Jobs the selfish man who doesn’t bother to remember birthdays or anniversaries; And Steve Jobs the lousy father who denied fathering his first daughter for the first six years of her life, and who wasn’t there much for his three children with Powell.

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.”- Steve Jobs

I was surprised when I learned that Steve Jobs was not only cooperating with Walter Isaacson on this book, but Steve Jobs approached Walter Isaacson to write this biography. Steve explained that it was because he wanted his children to truly know their father, and I’m so glad that I got to know him, too. The book was published 19 days after Jobs death in October 2011. There was a lot to his story to pack into 577 pages. 90% of the book covers Job’s professional career which is quite riveting to read. The latter pages of the book were not especially well crafted. This tapering off of quality is understandable since Isaacson was in the midst of writing a story about a man and company that were rapidly changing.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

In a strange dichotomy while I didn’t find the book to be objective it was at the same time unsympathetic to Steve Jobs. Jobs was an irascible tyrant and could be quite cruel to those around him when it came to Apple’s products and Apple’s vision. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist and genius revered by many people close to him. Not holding back Jobs told Walter Isaacson to write whatever he wanted and that he would not interfere.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is unique in its description of industrial design and products. There are literally hundreds of pages on this topic. One cannot decouple the industrial design decisions from Steve Jobs. I don’t think there is any other biography where I would care about the myriad of products presented here but somehow it works really well. In effect Apple is the legacy of Steve Jobs.

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Steve Jobs from the world's leading experts.

Bill Gates CEO/Microsoft [On Bill Gates's reading list in 2012.] (Source)

Elon Musk Founder/SpaceX Quite interesting. (Source)

John Doerr Recommends this book

Brian Chesky Co-Founder & CEO/AirBnb For Chesky, a source may come in the form of a biography of a business hero such as Steve Jobs or Walt Disney. His primary book source on management technique is Andy Grove’s High Output Management. (Source)

Gary Vaynerchuk Chairman/VaynerX I've read 3 business books in my life. If you call [this book] a business book. (Source)

Ken Norton Recommends this book

Ryan Holiday Author It’s unusual for modern biographies to be this good. It’s especially unusually for the subject of the biography to approach the biographer in the way that Steve Jobs did (thinking that he was the intellectual heir of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein). But despite those two things, this bio is and will likely forever be a classic. It shows Jobs at his best–determined, creative, prophetic–and at his worst–petty, selfish, tyrannical and vicious. You can learn just as much about what kind of leader you probably don’t want to be from this book as you can from anything else. That’s what is so... (Source)

Florian Hubner Probably all these autobiographies about great entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. They showed me the possibilities of entrepreneurship if you just have patience and ambition. And still right now…these books produce so many feelings of euphoria so that I just can't stop creating new stuff. (Source)

Chelsea Frank Many books on the most successful people in business are very compelling. I recently read “Steve Jobs: An Autobiography” by Walter Isaacson followed by “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” By Ashlee Vance. The parallels of the success of the unique individuals as well as their personalities was very interesting. I am quite sure, however, that their definition of “success” resembled something I would not wish to hold. I was also very sure that while they may both be considered some of the greatest minds in our history, they both struggled deeply with inner... (Source)

Pat Walls Favorite non-business book: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - if that counts as non-business. (Source)

Lewis Smith Also not a programming book, but inspiring if you are starting your own thing. (Source)

Seth Louey I believe that younger generations should focus on what they are passionate about. We are seeing a trend in tech where working remote, using your personal brand to grow your products, and funding through blockchain technology is the new way of creating startups. So I would read up on The Lean Startup, anything by Gary Vee, Artificial Intelligence, and biography/philosophy of Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs. (Source)

Fabrice Grinda I have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. (Source)

Ed Vinicombe Instead of the mundane "Marketing Tricks and Tips" kind of books, I enjoy personal stories of entrepreneurs and learning about their approach to life and business. One in particular that stands out (rather predictably) is the story of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Their autobiographies are fantastic reads and if you haven't read them - go and do it now! I love learning about their personalities and attitude to life - that is massively motivating for me in business. (Source)

Burly Vinson Not sure if this counts as a business book, but Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is a great book. It really lets you get a glimpse into the mind of one of the most successful creators/entrepreneurs in recent history. (Source)

Michael Hebenstreit If you want to become an entrepreneur and succeed in a competitive environment, then there are some evergreen books as well, for example: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. (Source)

Ovidiu Drugan For business best practice. (Source)

Robert Hajnal [Books I recommend] For growing a business: Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson; Call to action – Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg & Lisa T. Davis; Get to the top on Google – David Viney; Losing my Virginity – Richard Branson; The Snowball – Alice Schroeder. (Source)

Bogdan Iordache There are quite a few good business books on technology, and I'll list below some I find to be a good starting point. Personally, I like biographies a lot and I mostly read biographies of dead people, because those are the most honest ones. So because the computer age is still very young, there won't be a lot of biographies in my list. (Source)

Sanjiv Kapoor Speaking on my inspirations this afternoon... not just Steve Jobs the person, but also the book on him by Walter Isaacson which is equally inspiring. It is an innovation Bible that brings the important of passion to life. Truly inspirational. https://t.co/abOMN279iR (Source)

Dan Rockwell Recommends this book

Sean Si Recommends this book

Eytan Levit Recommends this book

Scott Belsky [Scott Belsky recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Dan Wootton @thejakeharrison Great book! (Source)

George Raveling [When I read this book] I was so blown away. I had underlined about three-quarters of the book. (Source)

Ed Zschau [Ed Zschau recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

Chris Fussell Really did a good job of capturing the way that an innovation leader’s mind works. (Source)

Thomas Hellmann It’s a page-turner. You actually want to know how the story ends. (Source)

Santiago Basulto I love to read biographies and stories of companies. Hatching Twitter is a really good book, and if you’re into that sort of books, bios of Steve Jobs (by Isaacson) or Jeff Bezos are great too. (Source)

Yaro Starak I love really detailed biographies, the thick ones, like the Arnold Schwarzenegger one and also Steve Jobs, the one done a few years ago was nice and solid really goes into the details, I love those. They’ve always been really impactful, whether it’s an entrepreneur or an athlete or a well-known celebrity or expert or historical figure, those biographies have had a big impact on me as well and just enjoyable to listen to. (Source)

Rankings by Category

Steve Jobs is ranked in the following categories:

#24 in Advertising
#49 in Audible
#27 in Autobiography
#4 in Bibliography
#67 in Biography
#25 in Business
#3 in Business Biography
#46 in Business Competition
#52 in Business Development
#25 in Business Economics
#29 in Business Motivation
#28 in Business Strategy
#8 in Cancer
#74 in Career Guide
#1 in Computer
#29 in Computer Science
#26 in Creativity
#15 in Current
#16 in Design
#8 in Documentaries
#21 in Engineering
#49 in Entertaining
#49 in Entertainment
#16 in Entrepreneurship
#25 in Factual
#30 in Game Changer
#3 in Heroes
#37 in Influence
#47 in Influential
#3 in Information Technology
#26 in Insightful
#15 in Inspiration
#35 in Inspiring
#58 in Interesting
#4 in Internet
#47 in Knowledge
#36 in Leadership
#76 in Learning
#65 in Life
#53 in Management
#48 in Marketing
#25 in Mars
#2 in Mathematician Biography
#35 in Motivational
#49 in Personality
#14 in Persuasion
#10 in Presentation
#11 in Product Design
#24 in Product Management
#3 in Silicon Valley
#16 in Startup
#46 in Strategy
#52 in Success
#1 in Technology
#25 in True Stories
#36 in Wealth
#44 in Wisdom

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Book Review of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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Genre : Professionals & Academics Author : Walter Isaacson Title : Steve Jobs ( Buy the Book )

Table of Contents

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… going to bed at night saying that we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me” . -Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was a man defined by integration. His personality, experiences, idiosyncrasies, and passion were poured into each of the companies that he built. The products that he created were an extension of himself, and he grew increasingly protective and attached to them, maybe even more than to his own family. He was a man known for his intensity and desire for complete control in his quest for perfection.

He once stated, “we do these things not because we are control freaks. We do them because we want to make great products, because we care about the user, and because we like to take responsibility for the entire experience rather than turn out the crap that other people make.”

Although he had a love for Zen Buddhism and claimed it gave him his focus and love of simplicity, he never truly found his inner serenity. He was known to be impatient, rude and quick to anger at times. Jobs was brutally honest and felt that it was “his duty to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.” He was a contrarian throughout his life and believed that if the majority were always right then, everyone would be rich.

There was a focus instilled in him that nothing, not even cancer, could disrupt. His ideas became visions; his visions became products, and his products later became the start of new ideas. Seeds of visions were planted by Jobs’ hard work and success; and still today, his “seeds” are creating new “insanely great” products.

He felt that doing something wonderful was not measured by what others regard as worthy, but rather by doing something that you love and pouring your whole heart into it. Steve Jobs left more than one dent in the universe.

Steve Jobs began his career in the mid-1970s after leaving Reed College, without graduating, and taking a position with Atari as a programmer. At the same time, his high school friend, Steve Wozniak, invented a machine they both used to make free long distance phone calls called “Blue Box,” soon to be followed by another Wozniak invention named Apple 1 (while working for HP).

In 1980 they took Apple public as the most oversubscribed IPO since the Ford offering in 1956. The age of personal computing had begun. The rest is (truly) history.

Jobs’ next twenty years were filled with both great success and periodic failure. He continually struggled with many in his personal life while constantly moving towards greater technological and commercial success. In the mid-1980s, he helped to create the Macintosh, which tightly aligned hardware and software for the first time yet was a commercial failure.

This period disrupted Jobs’ relationships within Apple, and he assigned himself to one of the firm’s least profitable divisions (higher education) and later resigned to begin NeXT, taking a team from Apple with him.

This too was not a commercial success but did produce a valuable new operating system that would later accrue to Apple’s benefit when NeXT was purchased by Apple for $400 million.

During this period, Jobs also began to work with Lucas Films which he soon purchased and renamed Pixar. At Pixar animation studios, Jobs became fascinated by the intersection of creativity and technology and became obsessed with animated short films. It was at Pixar that Jobs realized it would be vitally important for people to come to engage with technology in much the same way children play with their toys.

He also came to believe “that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they are made.” In the mid-1990s, Pixar animation studios went public for $1.2 billion.

After the purchase of NeXT, Jobs soon returned to Apple but not as the chief executive until 1997. When he reassumed the leadership of Apple, Jobs was not pleased with what the company had become and set out to revitalize it. A new culture was implemented using the slogan “Think Differently,” and Apple employees were challenged to return to their creative roots. Specifically, they were asked to focus again on making “insanely great products” that were tangible and to simply believe that “the money would follow.” They did, and it did.

Apple focused increasingly on going beyond complexity and moving towards simplicity. In this new era at Apple, Jobs began with the iMac, an approachable all-in-one desktop computer. Jobs also began to take more control of the end-to-end Apple process by forming Apple stores, against the will of his Board of Directors. The stores were an immediate and huge success. The stores were designed to think primarily about why the customers were there, rather than simply about the products themselves.

By this point, the evolution of traditional personal computing was cresting, and Jobs was among the first to recognize and to act upon that change. In 2001 Apple introduced iTunes, which became central to the music industry, and iPods which launched Apple into mobility oriented technology.

Jobs also realized the central emerging threat to Apple’s success was the proliferation of the mobile cell phone. Soon thereafter Apple elected to move decisively into that arena with the introduction of the iPhone, choosing to cannibalize many of their own products.

Finally, Apple introduced the iPad. Both of these products now dominate their respective product categories. What had started thirty years earlier as the Blue Box to make free long distance phone calls, designed by a couple of enterprising teenagers, had matured into a series of powerhouse products that in many ways ruled the world. Apple was also becoming the largest company on the planet.

However, no amount of special ability, financial success, or fame is sufficient to overcome the final facts of life. In the end, we are all just men; and regardless of our giftedness or our net worth, we are ultimately both flawed and finite.

Like every man Jobs was also highly flawed, perhaps in ways that were symmetric to his personal strengths. While his relationships with things was extraordinary, his ability to forge loving relationships with those around him was nearly none existent. His wife remarked, “like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in every realm.”

His life was also cut short by complications with his immune system, probably caused by his obsession with work, by his refusal to listen to others, and then ultimately by the ravages of pancreatic cancer. By the age of 56, Steve Jobs was dead.

Steve Jobs has a legacy as a modern-day industrial, and technological pioneer whose life work has radically changed the lives of perhaps billions of people along with the way business and politics are conducted around the world. Whether his contributions are ultimately for the betterment of mankind is perhaps in the eye of the beholder, and only history can be the final judge.

In the end, he did not wait for consumers to tell him what they wanted. He ran ahead and defined that for them, by the millions. Then he supplied the desire that he had created and then turned that desire into a need.

Today, April 2012, Apple is the fourth company in history to grow to 4% of the S&P 500. The chart below adds them to the other three. The realization may be sobering, but it is history, nonetheless.

The Start of Something Great

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, to two unwed University of Wisconsin graduate students, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali. However, because of family disapproval, the unnamed baby boy was given up for adoption.

His biological parents married soon after giving him up and had another child, whom Steve would meet later in life. Steve was adopted by Paul Jobs, a mechanically inclined high school dropout, and his wife Clara who was then working as a bookkeeper. They lived in Mountain View, California in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted, and although he never claimed to feel abandoned, his family and friends believed that this was not the case. These unproclaimed feelings of abandonment greatly contributed to the development of his distant personality.

He grew up working on cars and machines, but most notably the electronics within them.

He quickly took a liking to how electronics worked and always had an overwhelming curiosity with everything that he observed since his early childhood. This curiosity would be a key character trait throughout his life.

In the classroom, there was a struggle between Jobs and his teachers because he was obviously an intellectual child, and he was well aware of that fact. At the end of his elementary school years, Jobs demanded that his parents move to a better school district after he scored at a high school sophomore level in standardized testing.

In high school, he took an electronics class where he met his life-long friend and business partner, Steve Wozniak. They took an interest in electronics together, and it was not long before they were starting business ventures such as “The Blue Box” which enabled anyone to place a long-distance call for free.

Naturally, being high school students, one of their first tests of Blue Box was to prank call the Vatican. While “Woz” just wanted to use it for humor’s sake, Jobs saw an opportunity to market Woz’s invention and convinced him to do so. The Blue Box business did not last long, but it “paved the way for many more adventures together” Jobs recalled. He states that without the Blue Box there would not be an Apple.

After high school, Jobs’ parents forced him to apply to college. He only applied to Reed College, a small, private liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. He was accepted; but after six months of attending, Jobs was extremely perturbed that he had to abide by a class schedule and could not attend the classes that he was interested in, so he decided to drop out. He stayed there for a little over a year auditing classes and sleeping on the floor of his friends’ dorm rooms.

One of the classes that fascinated him was calligraphy.

This class was seen as his first exposure to the intersection of art and technology that would soon define his life and later play a key role in the development of Apple and Pixar.

During the launch of Apple, in late 1977, Jobs found out that his girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, was pregnant. At that time, he felt that a child was merely an unnecessary distraction, so he adamantly denied that the child was his.

Jobs had a way to distort reality into whatever he felt would be more convenient for him which was exactly what he did concerning his “alleged” daughter. There was no discussion of marriage, and the only role he played was to help name the baby “Lisa” days after birth. Chrisann and Lisa lived not too far from Jobs but rarely saw him. He continued to deny paternity even after a DNA test and court orders.

Jobs would not initiate a relationship with Lisa until she was seven years old. This was odd, as Steve felt abandoned as a child himself, but Apple was more important to him at the time.

When Jobs was thirty-one years old, he was in the process of buying Pixar and trying to get his company NeXT off of the ground, when his mother Clara was diagnosed with lung cancer.

He claims that he had the most intimate conversations with her while at her deathbed, asking her many questions about his adoption and learning more about his biological parents. Clara passed away shortly after being diagnosed.

His conversations with his mother inspired Jobs to learn more about where he came from, leading him to search more intently for his birth mother.

He found her in Los Angeles and learned that he had a sister named Mona Simpson, who resided in New York City. Steve never intended to track down his biological father because he resented him for the way he abandoned his family. This of course was very ironic because Jobs had practically abandoned his own daughter nearly seven years prior. Through all of these experiences, Jobs was finally beginning to see the importance of family.

Jobs met his wife, Laurene Powell, at Stanford Business School when he visited to give a “View from the Top” lecture. He asked her to dinner that night and quickly fell in love with her. Two years later on March 18, 1991, they were married at Yosemite National Park and already had a child on the way.

They moved into a small two-story house in Palo Alto where their kids could have a back yard to play in and be close to their friends. Steve and Laurene had three children named Reed, Erin, and Eve. Unfortunately, he did not have a strong relationship with his children for the majority of his life.

Jobs was very minimalistic in all aspects of his life; this proved true in his month-long debates about which washing machine to install in the house and the lack of furniture that he owned. He needed little for himself but wanted much for the world, which set the stage for the makings of great visions into reality.

An Apple Seed Begins to Grow

Jobs eventually left Reed College in 1974 and moved back to Silicon Valley where he then got a job at Atari as a video game designer. After several months at Atari, the strong interest in Zen Buddhism that he discovered in college led him to leave his position in order to seek “enlightenment” in India.

Jobs later credited his keen self-awareness and intuition to his exposure to Eastern teachings and spirituality–most of which he gained through multiple trips to various Eastern countries. He returned to Atari seven months after his first departure to India.

Steve Wozniak first laid eyes on the blueprints of a microprocessor that would later inspire him to create the first personal computer while attending a weekly computer club meeting in the garage of a friend. He revealed his invention to Jobs who was immediately impressed.

Although Woz’s original reaction was to share his newfound discovery with the rest of the computer club, Jobs had more profitable intentions for the design; and from there, the first Apple Computer was born.

The first computer was named the “Apple I” and was the start of a revolution in the consumer retail industry.

Since Steve Wozniak was still working for HP at that time and was not fully convinced of Apple’s potential, they added a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who Steve Jobs had previously worked with at Atari. Through borrowed spaces in family’s and friend’s garages and the capital raised by selling Jobs’ prized Volkswagen Bus, the three partners were able to scrounge together the parts to produce 200 Apple I computers which they later sold primarily to a local computer shop.

The Apple I came simply as a circuit board, meaning that the customer had to supply the monitor, the keyboard and the case. Jobs soon realized that Apple needed to create an integrated package and that they would need a significant amount of capital in order to support these ambitious plans.

Due to a previous failed business venture, Ron Wayne was too nervous about continuing with Apple and decided to sell his ten percent stake in the company for $800. If he had kept his stake, it would have been worth $2.6 billion in 2010.

Jobs and Wozniak traveled all over Silicon Valley attempting to earn funds for their new company endeavor. They were eventually able to get a supportive line of credit to start producing the “Apple II” from Mike Markkula, a Silicon Valley investor who Jobs happened to get along with.

The Apple II was first sold in 1977 and is credited with creating the personal computer market. Millions were sold well into the ‘80s. This was Apple’s first sign of significant success with a great product. Most will say that the Apple II was Wozniak’s creation and that this would inspire Steve to find his own spotlight in the future.

Apple Computer Co. went public the morning of December 12, 1980 and was the most oversubscribed IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. At the age of 25, Steve Jobs was now worth $256 million. Apple was still riding the coattails of the Apple II’s success and was searching for something new to keep itself on the map.

One Thing Leads to Another and Another

At the end of 1980, Jobs was ousted from a project he started within Apple because of multiple conflicts that arose from his presence in the office. He had a very demanding personality, held nearly impossible expectations and was very destructive to everyone around him. This falling out led Jobs into the already started and original “Macintosh” project, where he began to completely take control by recruiting employees from within Apple to be on the Mac team and buying new office space off the Apple campus.

Jobs’ philosophy was that to make a computer truly great, its hardware and software had to be tightly linked.

He required end-to-end control with all of his products at Apple, starting with the Macintosh. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right: “they don’t know what they want until we show them” was his belief and the driving force behind his visions.

As the Mac grew into a bigger and bigger project, Jobs realized that he was not capable of running an entire company at the time, so he recruited the president of the Pepsi Cola division of PepsiCo, John Sculley, to become the CEO of Apple. Sculley was a Master of Marketing, which was exactly what Jobs was looking for an addition to his team. Once Steve began to focus solely on the development of the Mac, it consumed his life.

The launch of the Mac took place during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, and it was a sensation. However, this sensation proved to be short-lived as sales of the Macintosh decreased exponentially as a result of lack of performance. Jobs had spent so much time ensuring that every part of the Mac was of the highest quality that he had consequently sacrificed the overall performance of the finished product.

By 1985, the tension between Jobs and the rest of management was at an all-time high. He was in constant denial, blaming the initial failure of the Mac on everybody but himself. His future at Apple seemed to be dwindling.

One of Apple’s weakest divisions was the university and education market, so when Jobs’ plan for the “Big Mac,” an education-based Macintosh, had been squashed, that proved to be the “final straw” for him. Jobs could see his departure coming so when he saw an exit opportunity that involved leaving on his own terms; he took it. He secretly recruited a team from Apple to depart with him, and he resigned from Apple on September 17, 1985, to start up a new company by the name of “NeXT.”

NeXT Inc. was designed to specifically target the higher education and business markets. Jobs and his engineers came up with a computer that could handle the complex information that was entered into university research labs. NeXT ran into problems early on.

They were running out of capital quickly; they could not get Microsoft to write software for the NeXT computer, and Apple had filed a lawsuit against Jobs. NeXT was never nearly as successful as planned; and when the computer was finally launched, they only sold about 400 per month. Despite these difficulties, NeXT was able to create an influential operating system, “NeXT STEP,” which would later be bought by Apple.

While launching NeXT, after his departure from Apple, Jobs received a call from an ex-Apple employee that worked in LucasFilms’ Computer Studio division. Jobs visited the studio and was fascinated with the beautiful intersection of creativity and technology. Jobs quickly purchased a majority of the computer studio and became chairman of what he named “Pixar” after the division’s Pixar Image Computer.

Initially, Pixar was primarily a computer hardware provider and only did animation on the side. Jobs’ plan was to revitalize the computer hardware sales, yet ironically, he found himself obsessed with the short films created in Pixar’s animation studio and soon realized this was what he would focus on. Because of his perfectionist tendencies, Pixar became known as the best animation studio in the nation.

Pixar was up and running with Jobs in control and movies on the forefront of his vision, but Pixar was on the verge of bankruptcy so they could not finance this endeavor alone.

Jobs pitched the idea of collaborating on a movie to the head of Disney’s film division, Jeffrey Katzenberg. Like Jobs, Katzenberg was known to be extremely passionate and driven. In May 1991, the two men came to an agreement. Pixar would be paid about 12.5% of the ticket revenues while Disney would own the movie and the rights to the characters in the movie.

There would also be an option for two more films with Disney. The idea for their first movie Toy Story came from a belief that both Katzenberg and Jobs shared, “Products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made.” Computers need to interface with a human; a toy needs to be played with by a child.

Buzz Lightyear and Woody were created to be those toys. From there the storyboards were created, but conflict occurred. Katzenberg wanted the characters to have a dark side so it would appeal to all ages, not just kids; what came from that was terrible, and production was halted. Jobs, who had stayed in the background trusting his team at Pixar, stepped forward and put up his own money to continue the work in the way they originally wanted the story to go. Jobs was excited to see that his vision could possibly transform the movie industry. There was more conflict between Jobs and Katzenberg over the budget, but eventually, the movie was completed.

“Whose movie was this?” was the question the two companies fought over.

Jobs touted Toy Story as a Pixar movie claiming that Disney was just the distributor and marketer. Disney, on the other hand, saw it as their movie because they financed and marketed it. Jobs soon realized that to be treated as an equal, Pixar would need its own funding and decided to go public. The Pixar IPO was the biggest IPO of the year surpassing Netscape. The company was valued at $1.2 billion by the closing bell of its IPO date.

Back at Apple

After Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985, Apple continued to coast on its high-profit margins and dominance of the desktop publishing industry. Microsoft was slowly gaining market share. By the time Windows 3.0 came out, Microsoft had mastered the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that differentiated the Macintosh from all other personal computers, leading Apple to begin losing market share.

Jobs claimed that John Sculley was hiring corrupt people with corrupt values and was ruining the company he once had control over. His disgust with Apple became so great that when once asked to autograph a Stanford student’s Macintosh keyboard, he would refuse until the student pried off all of the keys on the keyboard that were added after Jobs’ departure.

Apple needed a new operating system for the Macintosh and soon realized the one they had “in the works” would not be competitive with Microsoft. They decided to look outside of the company for an operating system that would fit well with the Mac and considered Steve Jobs’ NeXT to provide the software they needed. Apple bought NeXT for $400 million, and Jobs returned to Apple as the advisor to the chairman.

In July of 1997, Gil Amelio resigned as the CEO of Apple, leaving interim CEO Steve Jobs. Jobs soon realized the company was vastly different from the company he had left twelve years prior. Wanting to completely revitalize Apple, he asked his long-time friend Lee Clow to develop a new marketing campaign.

The “Think Different” campaign launched at the end of that year, which was a movement to rebuild the concepts the company was founded on challenged the consumer, as well as the employees at Apple, to remember where they came from and who their heroes were.

“This wasn’t a campaign about processor speed or memory; this was about creativity.” Jobs then went on to make a more tangible impact. In his first year back, Jobs laid off 3,000 employees saving a balance sheet that was 90 days away from insolvency. The next fiscal year returned a $309 million profit, up from a loss of $1.04 billion the previous year. He transformed the company’s focus from making money to making great products. He was confident that the money would follow, and he was right.

With this “rebuilding” movement, Jobs was looking for people within Apple who had interests and perspectives that aligned with his. One such person was Jony Ive, the head of Apple’s Design department who was not happy with the direction Amelio and Sculley were taking the company. Jobs convinced I’ve to stay on board and make “insanely great products” with him. They claimed to be “soul mates” in their devout love of true simplicity that came from conquering complexities, not just ignoring them.

Visions Became Insanely Great Products

The first of many insanely great products that came from the Jobs-I’ve collaboration was the iMac, an all-in-one desktop computer that was one of the first Apple products to sell for less than $2000. It had a futuristic-type plastic case that was painted blue and displayed the curves of a teardrop. It looked much different than any other computer in the world and was built to take the “fear of computers” away from consumers.

One way I’ve achieved this was by designing a handle for the top of the iMac. Realistically, no one was going to carry around their desktop computer with them, but he declared that a handle made the computer more approachable. These were the types of things that differentiated Apple from its competitors; they looked to overcome a problem before they were even sure it existed.

It was very apparent that Jobs despised not holding control over any aspect of his life, especially his life at Apple.

For the majority of his career, Jobs felt he had little control over the process of purchasing an Apple product. He was extremely frustrated that the person pitching his product to a potential consumer could be a high school dropout who only half-heartedly memorized the standard details of his product. In early 2000, Jobs brought Ron Johnson from Target to head his Retail division and develop an Apple store.

The Apple Board of Directors was very displeased with this decision, considering Gateway Computers had recently tried the very same approach and eventually failed horribly. The Apple stores developed a new concept in consumer retail, thinking about why the customer is there and not just about the products.

These stores were organized into separate sections based on what the customer wanted to accomplish with a new Apple product rather than on what the consumer thought he was interested in purchasing. The first Apple store opened May 2001 in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. By 2004, Apple stores were averaging 5,400 visitors per week and set a record for the line of stores quickest to hit the billion-dollar revenue milestone.

It seemed apparent that the personal computer industry was dying down as all of the excitement slowly began to fade over the years. Jobs was not at all satisfied with letting this happen, so he began thinking once again about how he could revolutionize the industry. In 2001, he launched a new strategy that would transform the personal computer into a “digital hub” with the capability to connect multiple devices such as video camcorders and music players. If he could connect the capabilities of these devices to this “digital hub,” then he could also create simpler mobile devices that could out-perform the competition.

Steve Jobs realized that the music industry was steadily growing larger as people began to download music using internet platforms such as Napster.

He saw an opportunity to create an organizational tool for music as well as a portable music player to fully integrate with the rest of Apple products. In 2001, he introduced the iTunes software with his new digital hub strategy and quickly began working on the “iPod,” a revolutionary portable media player that allowed the user to store up to 5,000 songs and scroll through them with the simple touch of a finger. The iPod was unveiled on October 23, 2001; and by the end of the year, 100,000 had been sold; yet another vision had been transformed into a reality.

A magnificently smooth connection was created to tie one’s computer, iTunes software and the iPod in order to manage music that one already owned. In order to purchase new music in the past, the consumer had to either download songs illegally online or venture out to a store and buy a CD, which led Jobs to his next vision.

He met with executives from the world’s five largest music labels and gradually convinced them to take part in the iTunes store, which would allow consumers to buy individual songs through iTunes for .99 cents, giving the record labels a large majority of the revenue. The iTunes store was announced in October 2003 and reached two million downloads in a little over two weeks.

Through all of these new advances in technology, Jobs created a turning point in yet another industry, almost single-handedly. Despite this outrageous success, Jobs felt it most important to find a way to capitalize on his end-to-end control of products once again.

The iPod had an enormous market share in the portable media player industry as a result of the popularity of iTunes and the iTunes store, which led to iPod sales accounting for over half of Apple’s revenue; all at the time when iPods solely worked with Apple computers. This in turn motivated more people to purchase computers from Apple and created what some people claimed to be a monopoly over the music industry.

Cancer Steps In

By 1997, Jobs was the active CEO of both Apple and Pixar. He was exhausting himself daily causing his immune system to weaken greatly. He developed not only multiple kidney stones over the following two years but also contracted many other health problems.

Once Pixar was acquired by Disney, Jobs had more time, which helped to temporarily ameliorate his health. In October 2003, Jobs ran into the urologist who treated him five years earlier for kidney stones and was asked to come for a follow-up CAT scan. The scan revealed a mysterious shadow on his pancreas; further study revealed the shadow was a tumor.

The doctor told him to get his affairs in order, which was the doctor’s way of telling Jobs that he only had months to live.

Further analysis of the tumor indicated that it was a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that was actually treatable. All that was needed was a surgery to remove the tumor, but to the horror of Jobs’ family and friends, he absolutely refused surgery. He did not want to open up his body for what he believed to be an unnatural process and in turn, decided that his strict vegan diet along with herbal remedies and other natural treatments were all that he needed for healing.

Nine months later, he gave in to the doctor’s diagnosis and voluntarily agreed to surgery. Unfortunately, by this time, cancer cells had already spread to other parts of his body, especially his liver. The doctors operated to remove cancer on his pancreas, but they could do nothing for his liver. This was only the first of multiple battles Jobs would soon face with the cancer that eventually lead to his death.

Where to Go from Here

By 2005, Apple was at its peak, and it seemed as if no other company could compete with them. Instead of basking in his success like most CEOs might have done in this situation, Steve Jobs only continued to ask the question “Where could we mess this up?” After much deliberation, he came to the conclusion that “the device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.”

His first strategy to combat this issue was to partner with Motorola, eventually leading to the phone called the “ROKR” that quickly failed. From there, Jobs decided to do everything in-house and added cell phones to Apple’s Consumer R&D division.

The “iPhone” was launched as the first multi-touch smartphone completely controlled by simply using fingers on a screen.

It was a phone, an iPod, and a breakthrough internet communication device all in one.

Competitors and consumer reviews stated that the iPhone would be too expensive to take off and even if it did, it would just cannibalize the sales of iPods. Jobs responded with one of his key business rules, “Never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself; if you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”

Despite these predictions, the iPhone went on to great success, with four successors to the original design and many more expected to come. Jobs was a man that did not make many compromises in his life, but the few that he did make were very critical to Apple’s success.

A perfect example of this was the App Store created for the iPhone that would also later be compatible with the iPad. While Jobs always liked complete control of his products, he realized that if he did not allow outside developers to create new apps for the iPhone constantly, they would eventually move on to the next smartphone available. This compromise proved to be a smart decision when Apple reached one billion app downloads on the iPhone alone in 2009.

Cancer Strikes Again

By 2008, it was quite clear that cancer was quickly spreading its way through Jobs’ body. He developed an eating disorder due to the removal of part of his pancreas and was losing weight rapidly when it came time to announce the iPhone 3GS in June 2008.

The launch event was overshadowed by his obvious health complications and overall sickly appearance. His health issues became common knowledge, and by October, Apple’s stock price had dropped approximately 50% due to public concerns.

In January 2009, Apple’s legal team forced Jobs to take medical leave, as it was not considered fair to shareholders to have him as CEO in this condition.

He was in desperate need of an almost immediate liver transplant and eventually found a donor in Memphis, Tennessee.

Even though the surgery was deemed successful, doctors still found cancerous masses in Jobs’ body. Throughout the lengthy recovery, Jobs had the opportunity to strengthen relationships with family and friends. Jobs’ daughter, Lisa, even came to visit him twice in Memphis, despite their distant and very frayed relationship. It did not take long for Jobs to dismiss his newfound phase of gratitude and go back to leading with his confident and demanding behavior. In May 2009, Jobs returned to Apple and got right back to work where he left off.

The multi-touch technology had inspired the iPhone was originally intended for a tablet, but Jobs’ keen awareness had highlighted Apple’s vulnerability in the cell phone industry. Once Apple showed its dominance with the iPhone, it was time to go back to the drawing board and design the tablet they dreamed about for years. In January 2010, Apple unveiled the “iPad.” One of Jobs’ strengths was his ability to convey his thought process in the design of a product and later ingrain that very process in the minds of the general public.

This stemmed from his philosophy of showing the customer what they need and then meeting that need. Jobs was foresighted throughout his life, and the iPad was no exception. Before the iPad went on sale, he was already working on how to improve it and even began designing the “iPad 2”.

Steve Jobs was constantly redefining reality. He knew the world around him was constantly changing, and Apple had to be able to change with it. By turning the Macintosh into a digital hub in 2001, he created a centerpiece for a plethora of devices. By 2008, Jobs saw the need to move this digital hub towards cloud computing and created a cloud-computing product called “MobileMe” in which all information and data could be stored in an online “cloud” and be synched with all of one’s devices.

Unfortunately, MobileMe was not designed well, so Jobs was quick to remove the man in charge and take control. He knew he had to regain consumer faith in Apple’s ability to fully integrate all of their mobile devices and computers. Apple released the “iCloud” in June 2011 and rejuvenated Apple’s concept of a seamless connection and giving them a competitive advantage in the next wave of digital technology.

The “Real” Business at Hand

When Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, he “made a deal with God or whatever, which was that [he] really wanted to see Reed graduate in June 2010.” He claimed that this is what got him through 2009. After realizing this was one of the first times he ever focused a goal around his family, Jobs began to look for a balance between family and business by making isolated attempts to reconcile those relationships.

He surprised Laurene for their twentieth wedding anniversary (a day which he usually forgot every year). Despite trying to show more interest in his daughters by taking them on trips around the world and spending more time with them individually, he never felt much of a connection with them.

When Laurene was questioned about Jobs’ distance from his family, she would reply, “like many great men whose gifts are extraordinary, he’s not extraordinary in every realm.”

Although it is apparent that Jobs never quite found a balance between family and business, his efforts showed an immensely different mindset in his later years.

As he continued to work, his condition worsened towards the end of 2010, and he was living in constant pain. By Christmas time, he had lost more than forty pounds, leaving him at a just 115 pounds. It was quite apparent that this was not just another bad spell and that a third and final medical leave would soon take place.

In January 2011, he announced to Apple’s Board he would be taking another medical leave, and Tim Cook would run operations until he returned. He knew he might not return, but he could not bear to permanently “leave his homeland.” Some of the best oncologists in the world worked towards a cure for his cancer, but hope was quickly diminishing by the day.

While Jobs was ill, he had many visitors, including his first daughter Lisa, who traveled from New York to see him although she didn’t move to Palo Alto as Jobs requested. He was happy they were able to reconcile their relationship after many years of not speaking.

The list of visitors continued with Larry Page of Google, Bill Clinton and ironically his life-long competitor Bill Gates. Even on his deathbed Jobs was brutally honest, while simultaneously brushing off wisdom to anyone in the Valley. In a reflection of his life, he recalled many instances where people such as Bill Hewitt poured into him; and in return, he wanted to spend the last days of his life “paying it forward.”

On August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple at the regularly scheduled board meeting and told the Board he would like Tim Cook to be his successor. Even after he resigned, he stayed for the duration of the meeting and berated a product review presentation, like nothing had even changed.

At the Core of the Apple

He was a man known for his intensity and desire for complete control in his quest for perfection. He once stated, “We do these things not because we are control freaks. We do them because we want to make great products, because we care about the user, and because we like to take responsibility for the entire experience rather than turn out the crap that other people make.”

He was a contrarian throughout his life and believed that if the majority were always right then, everyone would be rich.

Britt always taught us Titans that Wisdom is Cheap , and that we can find treasure troves of the good stuff in books. We hope this audience will also express their thanks to the Titans if the book review brought wisdom into their lives.

This post has been slightly edited to promote search engine accessibility.

Friday, August 23, 2013

"steve jobs" {by walter isaacson} book review.

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“Small Fry,” Reviewed: Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s Mesmerizing, Discomfiting Memoir

In her new memoir, “ Small Fry ,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs, one of Steve Jobs’s daughters, stresses how she relished the company of the Apple co-founder. She makes much of their sporadic roller-skating expeditions, and of the time he surprised her by crashing her class field trip to Japan. In a recent Times profile , she worried aloud that her book doesn’t do enough to capture Jobs’s one-of-a-kind fatherliness. “Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure?” she asked. “The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?”

To answer: yes, she does fail, if rendering Jobs as dear and pleasurable were ever really her aim. Steve Jobs was a man of many foibles, in ways we’ve long known about and in ways that are newly revealed in this book. He denied his paternity of Lisa until he was sued for child-support payments. He was, Brennan-Jobs alleges, a wellspring of sexually inappropriate comments. (She says that he wondered aloud at the breakfast table whether his daughter would grow up to look like Brooke Shields. “It gave me a strange feeling when he talked of the beauty of other women,” she recalls, “the longing in his voice when he talked of blonde hair or of breasts, gesturing weights in his cupped hands.”) She claims that he ignored her and kicked her out of family portraits. She spent her childhood ping-ponging between her mom’s place (Chrisann Brennan lived for stretches on welfare benefits) and her dad’s mansions: cavernous, barely furnished, with unused swimming pools and empty aviaries. (“A friend gave me a peacock once,” Steve tells Lisa, “but it wandered off.”) Brennan-Jobs admires her father’s brilliance and charisma, but her memoir elicits little sympathy for him, and “Small Fry,” a book of no small literary skill, is confused and conflicted, angry and desperate to forgive. Its central, compelling puzzle is Brennan-Jobs’s continuing need to justify not just her father’s behavior but her longing for his love. It is a mesmerizing, discomfiting reading.

Brennan-Jobs’s attempt to take control of some modest part of the Steve Jobs myth has almost inevitably unfolded in ways that reinscribe his power, both over his family and a reverent public. Laurene Powell Jobs, his widow, and Mona Simpson, his sister, released a statement rejecting Brennan-Jobs’s account : her “portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew,” they wrote. (Simpson’s co-signing of the statement completes a reversal: Brennan-Jobs says that she reeled with hurt when her aunt published the novel “ A Regular Guy ,” a thinly veiled lampoon of Jobs that featured a highly sympathetic Lisa stand-in.) The statement’s appeal to family loyalty, to closing ranks, underscores what is implicit throughout this memoir: the tantalizing possibility that Jobs’s cruelties also manifested his love. Nowhere is this clearer in “Small Fry” than in the faux mystery of the namesake of the Apple Lisa computer: he names one of his early masterpieces after his daughter, but denies it and denies it again; when he finally acknowledges the obvious, Lisa is twenty-seven, and he doesn’t admit it to her directly—he admits it to Bono, whose villa they are visiting in the South of France.

The book is as attentive to the women united and set at odds by their dependence on Jobs as it is to Jobs himself. “Small Fry” begins as a study of the relationship between Lisa and Chrisann, a tornado who cherishes her daughter but resents their difficult life; Steve is more an aching absence and a whiff of celebrity than a character. By the time Lisa is in middle school, Chrisann and Lisa’s fights grow so intense that Lisa moves in with her father and his new wife. Laurene, Brennan-Jobs writes, likes to call people “losers,” forming an L shape with her thumb and index finger. Laurene and Steve sometimes make out in front of Lisa, “moaning theatrically, as if for an audience.” When Lisa cries during a family therapy appointment, Laurene is impassive, saying, “We’re just cold people.” But Brennan-Jobs insists that she found her stepmother infuriating “because of the immensity of the job I had in mind for her. . . . I hoped she would fix our family, pry my father open, demand his full heart and attention and get him to acknowledge what he’d missed.” This is an admission of guilt—the mature Lisa accepts responsibility for the ways that her stepmother hurt and alienated her, which were caused by her own unreasonable expectations for the adults who had power over her. The near-apology sits uneasily alongside passages that trace the contortions she put herself through as a teen-ager: “I was unsure of my position in the house, and this anxiety—combined with a feeling of immense gratitude so overwhelming I thought I might burst—caused me to talk too much, compliment too much, to say yes to whatever they asked, hoping my servile quality would ignite compassion, pity, or love.”

Some autobiographies double as acts of self-assertion, opportunities for the author not only to express her side of the story but also to display forgiveness, resilience, strength. But Brennan-Jobs’s book seems more wounded than triumphant; it can feel like artfully sculpted scar tissue. Strafed by repeated rejections, the young Lisa retreats into “another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tingle when I felt small.” In “Small Fry,” there is a slippage between the two Lisas, a beguiling loss of distinction between the work of juvenile self-building and the work of memoir. The book often reads as a chronicle of pain, and of compensatory strategies—when her father mistreats her, Brennan-Jobs charms him, or appeases him, or lashes out. These dual conflicts with her parent and within herself often materialize in the text as surreal flights of passive aggression—she carefully itemizes offenses against her and then pointedly refuses to condemn them. When Chrisann asks Steve to buy a house for Lisa and herself and he buys it for his new girlfriend instead, Lisa affects feeling shame about her own hubris. Brennan-Jobs’s introspection has a frantic edge, as if she were still the seven-year-old girl who’d shown up to school in a too-thin dress and tried to distract her friends by spinning. “I kept twirling fast,” she recalls. “If I stopped, everyone would see that I was almost naked.” There is another assumption here, one that was conditioned by a difficult upbringing and that is inherent in publishing a memoir, no matter who you are: that everyone is watching and harshly judging.

Jobs eventually judges himself. He even apologizes. “I wish I could go back,” he sobs, stricken by cancer. “I wish I could change it.” His adult child writes in response that she grieves “our missed chance at friendship,” and the tender scene ends. Brennan-Jobs appears on the cover of her book as a girl’s outline, filled with flowers. The graphic promises regeneration and completion. The man who stares out from the famous Walter Isaacson biography is fierce, expectant. The photograph is so iconic that it looks like an iteration of itself, one of many billboards on a road with no off-ramp.

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INSANELY GREAT

by Jessie Hartland illustrated by Jessie Hartland ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2015

Nothing new or revelatory here, but the book can serve as a good introduction to Jobs and will impress with its concision...

A free-wheeling graphic biography of Steve Jobs.

The late visionary behind Apple and Pixar lent himself to caricature, and illustrator Hartland ( Bon Appétit: The Delicious Life of Julia Child , 2012, etc.) takes full advantage. Her inspirational version of the “insanely great” Jobs is a misfit who refused to follow the rules or play well with others, who was as rebellious as he was smart. Eventually becoming one of the richest men in the world, he followed a spiritual path of asceticism, looking for gurus, seeking a purer truth than can be found in material possessions. Yet he showed a remarkable lack of compassion and empathy toward his associates and was forced out of the Apple he had founded because others considered him so difficult. He wasn’t the computer whiz that his early collaborator Steve Wozniak was, but the marketing acumen of his passion for design and simplicity proved equally crucial in Apple’s transformation of the personal computer from a hobbyist pursuit into a paradigm-shifting commercial product. “Woz is the engineering genius,” the author writes in a kid’s scrawl that matches the rough-hewn illustrations. “Steve is the salesman with the big picture.” As she later quotes her subject, who saw Apple prosper beyond anyone’s wildest expectations, “I don’t think it would have happened without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.” Recognizing his own deficiencies, Jobs recruited Pepsi’s John Sculley to run the company: “While Steve knows himself to be quirky, tactless, confrontational, and insensitive, he knows Sculley is polite, polished, and easygoing”—though inevitably, there was a power struggle between the two. The narrative somehow squeezes Jobs’ important innovations—the iMac, the music empire of iPods and iTunes, the smartphone revolution, the iPad—into a breezy narrative that engages and entertains.

Pub Date: July 21, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-307-98295-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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More by Tony Hillery

BOOK REVIEW

by Tony Hillery ; illustrated by Jessie Hartland

by Leslie Kimmelman ; illustrated by Jessie Hartland

by Barry Wittenstein ; illustrated by Jessie Hartland

A GRAPHIC BIOGRAPHY

by Eugene Byrne illustrated by Simon Gurr ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2013

More text than younger readers will want to wade through, yet framed in a way that might seem silly to older readers.

A serviceable graphic summary of Darwin’s life and achievement, pegged somewhere between educational use for preteens and a primer for adult readers.

The latest collaboration between writer Byrne and illustrator Gurr ( Bristol Story , 2007) is a little odd in light of both the publisher’s reputation and the conventions of the graphic format—this is far more text-heavy than what readers of graphic novels have come to expect, and attempts at a playful sense of humor seem strained. To questionable effect, the narrative is framed as an episode of “Ape TV,” in which apes learn about the life of the unlikely scientist whose theory that mankind and the ape were part of the same evolutionary process would be so transforming. Once readers get past those apes and into the story itself, they learn that Darwin was an indifferent student and someone whose future by no means seemed secured, until he received an invitation to take a voyage that “would not just change Darwin’s life, it would change the course of history.” The commander of an expedition was looking for “a gentleman-naturalist as a companion,” someone who could keep him company as more of an equal than the crew under him. It says something about Darwin’s lack of immediate plans that he was able to commit to a journey that was anticipated to last two years yet lasted five. The animals he encountered seemed so different than ones he’d known that he theorized that if it weren’t a matter of different conditions that resulted in such “transmutation,” they might well have had a different creator. The text corrects common misconceptions concerning “social Darwinism” and “survival of the fittest,” yet is misleading in its attempt to reconcile creationism with Darwin’s theory.

Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-58834-352-9

Page Count: 100

Publisher: Smithsonian Books

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012

GENERAL GRAPHIC NOVELS & COMICS | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY

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Finished Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson earlier this week. Goddamn

I've never been an Apple obsessive (I've only owned a couple of iPods), and for the longest time I was iffy about Jobs himself (always thought he was self-absorbed dick), but I'd heard a lot of good things about his biography and thought I'd give it a try

I couldn't read it fast enough. Though I still think he's a self-absorbed dick (and apparently not a lot of people will disagree with that), I also came to admire his ambition, vision and work ethic. We can sit here questioning his intensity and his apparent apathy towards people's feelings, but we can't deny that, in the end, he made things happen, and he made them happen very well (most of the time). I know people criticize him for how he treated his first daughter and other things in his personal life, but I'm looking at him from a purely professional POV

I liked the bit at the end where Jobs and Gates are sitting together talking about their successes and admitting that the other's strategy worked out at the end (Gates/Microsoft licensing out their software to lots of companies, Jobs/Apple keeping a pretty tight rein on theirs)

I got a lot out of the book, and even found it motivational. I'm not going to rush out and buy any Apple products, but I do feel more confident about pursuing my own ambitions after reading this

Would love to hear your thoughts on the book

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Becoming Steve Jobs, book review: The biography Apple's genius really deserves

If you're inclined to disagree, just count the biographies - there must be a dozen, at least. Then there are the 'leadership secrets' books, the guides to his 'hippy capitalist' philosophy and more. Steve Jobs was not just a man - he was, and remains, an industry.

So if you want to learn more about Steve Jobs, where is the best place to start? Specifically, is the latest book on his life, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader , the place to begin? I think it is.

Until this book, written by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, came along, the canonical Jobs biography was Walter Isaacson's 2011 'authorised' effort, Steve Jobs . This was hyped by its publishers as a controversial take on Jobs' life. In fact, it turned out to be anything but. Personally, I thought it was worthy and somewhat dry.

Schlender and Tetzeli have written a much more interesting biography, and I think there are a couple of reasons for this. Over 25 years, Schlender worked for the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, while Tetzel worked for Fast Company , the technology, business and design magazine. Schlender interviewed Jobs at various times during those 25 years - including the interregnum, when Jobs left Apple to start NeXT , and after.

As Schlender told the Computer History Museum at an event earlier this month, over time he built a collection of "some 50 tape cassettes of interview with Steve Jobs". These turned out to be a treasure trove: "Often we talked spontaneously over the phone," Schlender told the museum , adding that he had "forgotten just how often we would talk at length".

Schlender first met Jobs when the latter was setting up NeXT in 1988, after being ousted from the company he co-founded. Over the years the two got to know each other well, but before that first interview Schlender, who at that time was working for the Wall Street Journal , had to justify his presence to Jobs, who was not going to waste his time trying to explain technology to a financial journalist who didn't know a bit from a byte.

Schlender passed the test, the interview went ahead, leading to more interviews, and eventually to the book reviewed here.

Setting the record straight

Becoming Steve Jobs is an honest attempt to set the record straight on Jobs.

The authors point out: "In part because of the way Steve quarrelled with [Mike] Markkula and [Mike] Scott, in part because he brazenly asserted his opinions as fact, and in part because over the length of his career, he neglected to share credit for Apple's success in the press, Steve developed a reputation as an egomaniac who wasn't willing to learn from others. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the man, even during his youngest, brashest and most overbearing years."

"While Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance he also sought it out elsewhere."

In a (longish) nutshell, I think that's as neat a summing up of Steve Jobs as you could wish for. Yes, Jobs was misunderstood by many, including many of those close to him, and, yes, he was an extremely complex person. But so, I suspect, are most geniuses - doesn't that go with the territory?

For me, Steve Jobs was summed up by the famous '1984' commercial that ran on US TV in the prime half-time slot at that year's Super Bowl final. I remember it well - not only because at the time I was a big NFL fan, but also because, working for a computer magazine, I had heard that Apple had something big planned for a launch that would coincide with the biggest single sporting event in the US.

In the '1984' advert we saw a young female athlete in full colour, running past serried ranks of monochrome drone-like people to hurl a sledgehammer at a black-and-white screen on which a Big-Brother-like figure was giving a speech. A cover line declared that Apple's forthcoming Macintosh launch event would show "why 1984 won't be like Nineteen Eighty-Four ".

No expense had been spared. The advert was directed by Ridley Scott, who worked in advertising before moving on to films such as Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator .

This spectacular, unforgettable advertisement would only be shown once on national TV, but in one minute it defined Steve Jobs. It was inspirational, it was creative genius, it was truly brilliant - exactly like the man himself.

Bill Gates could not have put it any better than when he said of Jobs: "I was never in his league." That's some admission from a man like Gates, but it speaks volumes for both men.

In another quote from Schlender and Tetzeli's book, Gates said of Jobs: "It was just amazing to see how precisely he would rehearse. And if he's about to go on stage, and his support people don't have the thing right, you know, he is really, really tough on them. He's even a bit nervous because it's a big performance. But then he's on and it's quite an amazing thing."

And that was the Steve Jobs that those who were lucky enough to encounter him will remember. He had charisma that others, who may have been his equal in fame and fortune, could only dream of. And no matter how unpleasant he might at times choose to be, it was difficult, if not impossible, to dislike the man.

One thing about Steve Jobs that just about everybody can agree on is that the world is a poorer place after his untimely death.

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Elon Musk Hardcover – September 12, 2023

Print length 688 pages
Language English
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date September 12, 2023
Dimensions 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10 1982181281
ISBN-13 978-1982181284
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
#1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
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About the author, walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 77% 17% 4% 1% 1% 77%
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5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 77% 17% 4% 1% 1% 1%

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Customers say

Customers find the book amazing, exquisite, and well-written. They also appreciate the depth of content, saying it's refreshingly objective, presenting the facts without sugarcoating. Readers describe the biography as compelling and exciting. They find the characters fascinating and ruthless. Opinions are mixed on the storyline, with some finding it meticulously crafted and long, while others say it'd be better if it were disjointed. Customers also have mixed feelings about the content, with others finding it candid and fair, while other find it hypocritical and rash.

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Customers find the book captivating, displaying an exquisite balance of awe-inspiring moments coupled with grounded critique. They also appreciate the short chapters, each on a different theme. Readers say the book provides insight into both Musk’s incredible genius and ruthless. They say it’s refreshingly objective, presenting the facts without sugarcoating, allowing them to form their own opinions.

"...curious about the world-changing ideas of our time, this book is a captivating and enlightening journey that is not to be missed...." Read more

"...This biography is a masterclass in storytelling, offering a captivating and nuanced exploration of Musk's life, from his childhood to his..." Read more

"... it's a good read imo . a page turner. overall i'd say it's a study of character rather than a cut and dry accounting of what elon has done...." Read more

"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody, genius , flawed, spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book well written, concise, and well structured. They also appreciate the key insights and creative approach.

"...The prose flows seamlessly , keeping the reader engaged and eager to turn the page.Timely and Relevant:..." Read more

"...Isaacson's writing is engaging , and his research is meticulous...." Read more

"...The book is well written . The writer shadowed Musk for two years and experienced first hand his genius and his flaws ...." Read more

"Good read. Well written and researched. About a lucky guy who made a lot of money early in his career...." Read more

Customers find the book refreshingly objective, presenting the facts without sugarcoating. They also describe Elon as very intelligent, interesting, and erratic. Customers appreciate the past and present, and never giving up. They say the book is factual, amusing, and written unbiased.

"...For aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators, the book provides a treasure trove of lessons on perseverance, problem-solving, and thinking beyond..." Read more

"...The book provides invaluable insights into Musk's innovative spirit, his relentless drive, and his passion for shaping the future...." Read more

"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody , genius, flawed, spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

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Customers find the biography compelling, extraordinary, and candid. They also appreciate the author's believable and commendable portrayal of the main characters.

"...In conclusion, "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern..." Read more

"...This biography is a masterclass in storytelling , offering a captivating and nuanced exploration of Musk's life, from his childhood to his..." Read more

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Customers find the characters fascinating, awesome, and flawed. They also say the author does a fantastic job portraying an unbiased depiction of Musk's work, family life, and moral. Readers also mention that the portrait is both nuanced and comprehensive.

"...automotive industry, Musk's visionary ideas are portrayed with enthusiasm and intellectual depth ...." Read more

"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental , moody, genius, flawed, spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

" Interesting character . Well written" Read more

"...Isaacson tackles it all, painting a portrait that's both nuanced and comprehensive...." Read more

Customers find the visual presentation of the book insightful, unique, and thoughtful. They also say the book provides a comprehensive look at Elon Musk's life.

"..." by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern visionary...." Read more

"...over the last few years, it really shows the good, the bad, and the ugly . Mostly good, crazy, and mind boggling things...." Read more

"Another great biography by Walter Isaacson. A very thorough look at a modern day Einstein and the hard work he puts in and a look at some of his..." Read more

"...Still, an important and unbiased look at the Nicola Tesla of our age." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the storyline. Some find the narrative outstanding and a page turner, while others say it's disjointed, time jumping at times, and confusing. They also say the book is long and the ending is disappointing.

"... Compelling Narrative Style :Walter Isaacson's storytelling skills are evident throughout the book...." Read more

"...But this was different. Its short chapters and sub chapters made it very readable...." Read more

"...is accurate, though as a genuine believer in that mission, seemed awfully short ...." Read more

"...It is full of amazing events and details about what happens in parts of the world, including the world of AI, of which ordinary people know close to..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the author extraordinarily candid and fair in his commentaries about the main characters. They also appreciate Elon Musk's audacity, visions, drive, and result. However, some customers say the book is grossly inept, boring, and disjointed. They say it's not purposefully dishonest and not good journalism.

"...he asked a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy . Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”"..." Read more

"...Isaacson's work is a testament to the power of biography to inspire, educate , and entertain." Read more

"...It was also the most boring ten pages of the book and I'm unsure why he decided to do that...." Read more

"...also it was hilarious ...." Read more

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Jobs report revision: US added 818,000 fewer jobs than believed

The labor market last year seemed to shrug off historically high interest rates and inflation , gaining well over 200,000 jobs a month.

Turns out the nation’s jobs engine wasn’t quite as invincible as it appeared.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revised down its estimate of total employment in March 2024 by 818,000, the largest such downgrade in 15 years. That effectively means there were 818,000 fewer job gains than first believed from April 2023 through March 2024.

So, instead of adding a robust average of 242,000 jobs a month during that 12-month period, the nation gained a still solid 174,000 jobs a month, according to the latest estimate.

The revision is based on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which draws from state unemployment insurance records that reflect actual payrolls, while the prior estimates come from monthly surveys. The estimate is preliminary, however, and a final figure will be released early next year.

The largest downward revision was in professional and business services, with estimated payrolls lowered by 358,000, followed by a 150,000 downgrade in leisure and hospitality and 115,000 in manufacturing.

Is the Fed expected to lower interest rates?

The significantly cooler labor market depicted by the revisions could affect the thinking of Federal Reserve officials as they weigh when – and by how much – to lower interest rates now that inflation is easing. Many economists expect the Fed to reduce rates by a quarter percentage point next month, though some anticipated a half-point cut after a report early this month that showed just 114,000 job gains in July.

Wednesday’s revisions underscore that the labor market could have been softening for much longer than previously thought.

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Is the US in recession right now?

Although the new estimates don't mean the nation is in a recession, “it does signal we should expect monthly job growth to be more muted and put extra pressure on the Fed to cut rates,” economist Robert Frick of Navy Federal Credit Union wrote in a note to clients.

Some economists, however, are questioning the fresh figures. Goldman Sachs said the revision was likely overstated by as much as 400,000 to 600,000 because unemployment insurance records don’t include immigrants lacking permanent legal status who have contributed dramatically to job growth the past couple of years.

Based on estimates before Wednesday's revisions, about 1 million jobs, or a third of those added last year, likely went to newly arrived immigrants, including many who entered the country illegally, RBC Capital Markets estimates.

Also, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages itself has been revised up every quarter since 2019 by an average of 100,000, Goldman says. In other words, Wednesday's downward revision could turn out to be notably smaller when the final figures are published early next year.

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Columbiana readers guild donates 50 books to joshua dixon elementary.

The Columbiana Readers Guild recently donated 50 books to Joshua Dixon Elementary School’s on-site library in Columbiana to share their love of reading. (Submitted photo)

COLUMBIANA — The Columbiana Readers Guild, which is a part of the Columbiana Women’s Club, recently donated around 50 books to Joshua Dixon Elementary School for their school library.

Longtime guild member Pat Tingle explained that she joined the group 20 years ago and encouraged them to review more current books by authors such as Toni Morrison and hold discussions, which differed from their existing practice of participant’s giving book reports.

“The Columbiana Readers Guild was a good option (to occupy) women that outlive their husbands,” Tingle explained, adding that many of the original 30 members had either moved to be closer to family or passed away leaving them down to seven members.

Barbara Morey was one of those members who moved to live closer to family and had forwarded Tingle a $500 check to use for something that would share the guild’s love for reading.

“After much discussion, we decided to give a collection of books to Joshua Dixon Elementary School,” Tingle explained, adding she had a special relationship with children’s literature herself having taught it at the college level in Georgia and Connecticut before moving to Columbiana.

Teaming up with Margaret McBane, who is active with Columbiana Public Library, Tingle explained how the duo went to buy various children’s books at shops in Boardman and Youngstown — both current popular titles and old favorites.

She manned the shopping cart as McBane would toss in the titles of choice.

Online shopping through websites like Amazon also proved fruitful — the women secured around 60 books that they were able to have all seven guild members scribe their names within the front, as well as a brief tribute to Morey, and gift to Dixon school in time for classes to start.

The guild members enjoyed the experience, getting to glance through the books — familiar and not familiar — before signing the inside cover as well as briefly share their thoughts.

“The donation included many beautiful books for our school library,” explain Dixon principal Dr. Kim Sharshan. “We soon will be getting them into the hands of our students at Joshua Dixon.”

The school administrator expressed her appreciation for the gift of books.

“The authentic literature will expose students to a variety of genres, real-life examples of language and import a lot of reading,” she added.

“It was a good social activity for (the Columbiana Readers Guild), and Columbiana is such a nice school district that it was nice to be available to encourage this love of reading,” Tingle concluded.

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Review: ‘Only Murders in the Building’ off to a killer start to Season 4 as the trio travels to Hollywood

Jason Fraley | [email protected]

August 27, 2024, 1:33 PM

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Fourth seasons of sitcoms are often their funniest from “Seinfeld” (The Contest) to “The Office” (The Fun Run), from “The Simpsons” (Mr. Plow) to “Cheers” (the arrival of Woody Harrelson). Maybe we need a little time to get to know the characters. Maybe we need a few seasons to embrace the unique tone. Or maybe the writers have finally gelled in the writers room and are finally swinging for the fences with their wildest, most creative ideas.

Whatever the reason, “Only Murders in the Building” is doing just that for me. Season 1 was an intriguing setup that felt too stretched out, Season 2 was too much of a rehash of the first season, Season 3 finally hit its stride with a change of scenery to Broadway with Martin Short staging, “Death Rattle” and Steve Martin hilariously singing, “Which of Pickwick Triplets Did It?” On Tuesday, it returns for Season 4 with a killer opening episode.

Don’t worry if you missed last season — the Broadway murder of Ben (Paul Rudd) is officially a closed case and we’re moving on to another murder mystery for Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) to solve. All you need to know is that the Season 3 finale ended with Charles’ body double Sazz (Jane Lynch) being mistakenly murdered in Charles’ Arconia apartment in an apparent botched attempt to kill him.

As our trio of protagonists return to Charles’ apartment in the Season 4 premiere, the writers brilliantly mess with audience expectations at every turn as the characters keep finding ways to not discover Sazz’s body. They gasp in the dark, point at things and inspect the floor in what amounts to a bunch of close calls to fake out the viewers, before the camera pulls backwards out of the window to reveal a bullet hole, which the characters don’t see.

They’re too busy celebrating their podcast, which is being made into a movie if Paramount can convince them to sign over their life rights. Mabel is skeptical of her portrayal as a “mumbling millennial;” Charles is tempted by a return to fame as TV’s Brazzos; and Oliver is ecstatic for a chance to rekindle with love interest Loretta (Meryl Streep) and bounce back from his showbiz setback: “Broadway is a racket, but Hollywood never let me down!”

Seeing the trio travel to Hollywood is more than just Lucy and Ricky moving west, it makes for some genuinely hilarious situations with several laugh-out-loud moments. Steve Martin is in top form, recalling “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (1982) by speaking dialogue that might as well be narration: “Hollywood: where movie stars live side by side with eccentrics who’ve been here for decades, everyone from Scarlett Johansson to The Black Dahlia.”

It’s also great to see Molly Shannon (“SNL”) show up as Paramount producer Bev, as well as a trio of famous movie-star actors (appearing as themselves) who attend a lavish L.A. party to meet their fictional counterparts. I won’t spoil who they are, but let’s just say Charles will be played by a hilarious sitcom dad, Mabel will be played by a desperate housewife, and Oliver will be played by a deliciously deadpan actor who now hosts a viral talk show.

Just when you thought Season 4 premiere couldn’t get any better, it ends with some truly powerful filmmaking intercutting Charles watching the classic Spaghetti western “Once Upon a Time in West” (1968), admiring Sergio Leone’s ability to rivet us with no dialogue, only imagery and windmill sound effects. “Only Murders” follows suit with a largely silent revelatory montage, ending with a powerful image that cuts to black at just the right moment.

I know it’s only one episode, but I’m hooked! I’m so glad this show is back. It keeps getting better and better. Here’s hoping for more zany adventures in Hollywood between the necessary clue-finding at the Arconia.

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Hailed by The Washington Post for “his savantlike ability to name every Best Picture winner in history," Jason Fraley began at WTOP as Morning Drive Writer in 2008, film critic in 2011 and Entertainment Editor in 2014, providing daily arts coverage on-air and online.

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Michelle Obama’s Speech Turns Trump’s ‘Black Jobs’ Line Against Him

The former first lady enthralled a packed arena on Tuesday evening with one of the Democratic National Convention’s most emphatic takedowns of Donald J. Trump.

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Michelle Obama Speaks on Second Night of Democratic Convention

The former first lady delivered a takedown of former president donald j. trump, asking, “who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘black jobs’”.

For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black. I want to know. I want to know who’s going to tell him? Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?

By Katie Rogers

Reporting from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago

Published Aug. 21, 2024 Updated Aug. 22, 2024

Michelle Obama, the former first lady and one of the most popular figures in the Democratic Party, delivered one of the Democratic National Convention’s most emphatic takedowns of former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night and turned one of his most controversial campaign lines against him: “Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?” she said.

Mrs. Obama, a reluctant campaigner, enthralled a packed arena in Chicago with a convention appearance that lent firepower to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. She offered support and praise for Ms. Harris, but focused much of her nearly 20-minute speech squarely on Mr. Trump, mocking his past comments, his background and his behavior, while mostly avoiding naming him.

And for a speech delivered at a political convention, her remarks struck a remarkably personal tone as she spoke of the former president, who led a multiyear campaign to question the birthplace of her husband, former President Barack Obama.

“For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us,” she said, adding that “his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black.”

She zeroed in on his debate-night complaint about immigrants taking “Black jobs” by pointing out that the presidency of the United States has been one and might soon be again. She said that Americans like Ms. Harris understood “that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” a reference to Mr. Trump’s business troubles. She noted that most Americans do not grow up with “the affirmative action of generational wealth.” (Mr. Trump was born into a wealthy family in Queens.)

“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top,” she said. Line by line, she received thunderous applause.

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IMAGES

Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Secondary ELT Readers Level 3
Book review : Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs / Steve Jobs: A Biography (Paperback)
30 books Steve Jobs recommended

COMMENTS

Book review: 'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson
In many ways, the Jobs of the early '80s at the outset of his breathtaking career is the same feisty and impetuous man we find at the end of the book, picking apart his plans to build a yacht ...
'Steve Jobs' by Walter Isaacson
A correction was made on. Oct. 26, 2011. : The Books of The Times review on Saturday, about "Steve Jobs," by Walter Isaacson, described Angry Birds, a popular iPhone game, incorrectly ...
STEVE JOBS
20. Our Verdict. GET IT. Google Rating. An unforgettable tale of a one-of-a-kind visionary. With a unique ability to meld arts and technology and an uncanny understanding of consumers' desires, Apple founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011) played a major role in transforming not just computer technology, but a variety of industries.
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson's worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative ...
Review of "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson 656 pages Simon & Schuster Published: October 2011 Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" was published in the fall of 2011, three weeks after Jobs died at the age of 56. Isaacson is an author, journalist and former CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein…
Book Review: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson
Steve Jobs was very much a child of the 60s, a decade of youthful rebellion. He was troublesome while growing up and played many pranks in school. Jobs held a disdain for authority and possessed a ...
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. In our world of bite-sized attention spans, it probably seems to some that he has already been gone for decades. Rushed into publication only three weeks after Jobs's death and several months ahead of its publication date, Walter Isaacson's book is more a work of journalism than it is the kind of ...
Walter Isaacson "Steve Jobs"
Jobs was accused of being a tyrant. Jobs response was characteristic "People do have the freedom to watch porn. They can buy an android.". The book is not just the story of Steve Jobs. It's a story of the revolution in the tech industry. It is thorough, and at times digressive and exhausting but like Steve Jobs himself- never dull.
Steve Jobs : The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson
Book Review: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I knew that I would enjoy this book after reading the first few pages, but it far exceeded my expectations. I love learning the history behind products that I am familiar with, and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson lays out the history of every product Steve Job's is responsible for.
Book Reviews: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Updated for 2021)
Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson | 4.37 | 924,829 ratings and reviews. Recommended by Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Gary Vaynerchuk, and 41 others. See all reviews. Ranked #1 in Artist Biography, Ranked #1 in Inventors — see more rankings. From the author of the bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive, New ...
Book Review: Steve Jobs
A devoted Apple user, I am captivated by the aesthetics and elegance of the brand. As such, I am the consumer Steve Jobs set out to create. Perhaps in a way not unrelated to that bias, I offer fair warning that this is not the usual book review. The volume has a nominal author, but to me Steve Jobs's personality overshadows the book itself ...
Amazon.com: Steve Jobs: 9781451648539: Isaacson, Walter: Books
Steve Jobs. Hardcover - Big Book, October 24, 2011. Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and ...
Book Review of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
By the age of 56, Steve Jobs was dead. Steve Jobs has a legacy as a modern-day industrial, and technological pioneer whose life work has radically changed the lives of perhaps billions of people along with the way business and politics are conducted around the world.
Book review: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs By Walter Isaacson Little, Brown 627 pages ISBN: 978-1-4087-0374-8 £25. Wendy M Grossman. "All progress depends on the unreasonable man," George Bernard Shaw wrote in 'Maxims for ...
Book Review: Steve Jobs
The book, which was released in 2011, explores the incredible life of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., providing insights into his innovative ideas, visionary leadership, and unwavering ...
Delicious Reads: "Steve Jobs" {by Walter Isaacson} Book Review
BOOK SUMMARY: A riveting biography about the brilliant and sometimes controversial icon, Steve Jobs.Walter Isaacson interviewed more than forty people over a span of two years to come up with an accurate portrayal of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a very layered and complex genius, developing Apple, and Pixar, among other things.
"Small Fry," Reviewed: Lisa Brennan-Jobs's Mesmerizing, Discomfiting
Steve Jobs was a man of many foibles, in ways we've long known about and in ways that are newly revealed in this book. He denied his paternity of Lisa until he was sued for child-support payments.
Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography
Her books include Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different; Tommy: The Gun that Changed America; Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History, and Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX. Her books have won a Sibert Honor and a Jane Addams Children's Book award and have been a finalist for YALSA's Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award ...
BOOK REVIEW
Early Life Influences. The account begins with orphaned Steve and his way into the lives of Paul and Clara Jobs. The influence of childhood in one's life is evident throughout the book.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Steve Jobs: A Biography
If you have spent the last fifteen years romanticizing about Steve Jobs and his products, this book will leave you punch-drunk. You will learn through stomach-churning details how Steve Jobs was a disloyal, lying, backstabbing, vindictive, manipulative, vengeful, and all-around vile and damaged human being.
STEVE JOBS
amazon. A free-wheeling graphic biography of Steve Jobs. The late visionary behind Apple and Pixar lent himself to caricature, and illustrator Hartland (Bon Appétit: The Delicious Life of Julia Child, 2012, etc.) takes full advantage. Her inspirational version of the "insanely great" Jobs is a misfit who refused to follow the rules or play ...
Finished Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson earlier this week. Goddamn
Goddamn : r/books. Finished Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson earlier this week. Goddamn. I've never been an Apple obsessive (I've only owned a couple of iPods), and for the longest time I was iffy about Jobs himself (always thought he was self-absorbed dick), but I'd heard a lot of good things about his biography and thought I'd give it a try.
Becoming Steve Jobs, book review: The biography Apple's genius ...
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader • Crown Business • 464 pages • ISBN 9780385347402 • $30. Steve Jobs was one of the most compelling and ...
Amazon.com: Elon Musk: 9781982181284: Isaacson, Walter: Books
#1 New York Times bestseller From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
In 'River Songs,' Steve Duda recounts fly-fishing joys and struggles
Duda will speak about his new book at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 4, at Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way N.E. #A101, Lake Forest Park; free with RSVP; 206-366-3333 ...
Jobs report revision: US added 818,000 fewer jobs than believed
The labor market last year seemed to shrug off historically high interest rates and inflation, gaining well over 200,000 jobs a month. Turns out the nation's jobs engine wasn't quite as ...
Columbiana Readers Guild donates 50 books to Joshua Dixon Elementary
COLUMBIANA — The Columbiana Readers Guild, which is a part of the Columbiana Women's Club, recently donated around 50 books to Joshua Dixon Elementary School for their school library. Longtime ...
New data shows US job growth has been far weaker than initially ...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data suggests that there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March of this year than were initially reported.
Review: 'Only Murders in the Building' off to a killer start ...
Seeing the trio of Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez travel to Hollywood makes for some genuinely hilarious situations with several laugh-out-loud…
Michelle Obama's Speech Turns Trump's 'Black Jobs' Line Against Him
Michelle Obama's Speech Turns Trump's 'Black Jobs' Line Against Him. The former first lady enthralled a packed arena on Tuesday evening with one of the Democratic National Convention's ...