Book Description
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two
years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred 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 entrepreneur whose passion for
perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal
computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital
publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its
innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build
digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of
inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to
create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with
technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were
combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Although 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 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.
Driven by demons,
Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his
personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and
software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is
instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation,
character, leadership, and values.
Product Detail
Buy Steve Jobs
More About the Author
Biography
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of
CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography, and
the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He
lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.
Customer Review
Gripping but amazingly incomplete, October 27, 2011
This review is from: Steve Jobs (Hardcover)
This is a gripping journey into the life of an amazing individual.
Despite its girth of nearly 600 pages, the book zips along at a torrid
pace.
The interviews with Jobs are fascinating and revealing. We
get a real sense for what it must have been like to be Steve, or to
work with him. That earns the book five stars despite its flaws, in
that it's definitely a must-read if you have any interest at all in the
subject.
But there are places in the book where I have to say, "Huh?"
The
book is written essentially as a series of stories about Steve. The
book continuously held my interest, but some of the dramas of his life
seem muted. For instance, he came close to going bust when both Next
and Pixar were flailing. There was only the slightest hint that
anything dramatic happened in those years. In one paragraph, Pixar is
shown as nearly running him out of money. A few brief paragraphs later,
Toy Story gets released and Jobs' finances are saved for good.
We
hear a lot about Tony Fadell's role in the development of iPhone. Tony
led the iPod group and was clearly a major source for the book. You
may know from a recent Businessweek article that Tony was basically
driven out of the company shortly after the final introduction of
iPhone, due to personality conflicts between him and Scott Forestall,
the person now in charge of iOS development. But the book doesn't say a
word about it. Tony simply disappears from the rest of the book with
no explanation, and Forestall is barely mentioned.
Another
strange incident was the Jackling house, the house he spent a large part
of his life in. A case could be made that the house is historic simply
because Steve spent many of his formative years living in it.
Preservationists were battling with him to save the house. Only a
couple of months before his death, when he must have known he was not
going to actually build a house to replace it, he had the house torn
down. I would have loved to learn this story. Why did he buy it? Why
did he destroy it through neglect? Why did he acquire such a blind
loathing for it that he worked hard to get it torn down?
And why
did Jobs keep almost all the Pixar options to himself? He doesn't seem
to have needed the money, or even really wanted it that much. He could
have cut his friends John Lasseter et al into their own huge fortunes.
Lasseter only got about $25 million from Pixar, which seems like a
shockingly low amount in view of his contributions. Now, it's not like
they will starve or anything, and I think John can buy pretty much
anything he wants, but it still seems surprising Jobs is so ungenerous.
There
were a lot of things like this, incidents casually tossed away in a
brief paragraph that should have merited an entire chapter.
I
think this will always be the best account of the emotional aspects of
Steve's life, which are fully covered. The chapters about his illness
moved me to tears. But as an account of what really happened at Apple
and how Steve fixed the company, it's insufficient. I guess that will
have to await more distance from the subject.
Of course what's
truly remarkable about Jobs is that he lived a life so full of incident
that perhaps no biography has the space to cover the broad sweep of his
life. He accomplished as much as 10 ordinarily famous men. Maybe the
upshot is that you just can't fit a man like this in a book, even if
that book's nearly 600 pages.
Read More..
