Steve Jobs

So I received Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (the Steve Jobs biography if you couldn’t figure that out by the title) as a birthday present from my parents this past year.  And although I love to read, biographies aren’t usually in my repertoire.  In fact, I can’t tell you the last one I read.  So I was facing a conundrum.  I could set the book aside and if my mom asked about it I could lie and say I read it and it was great; I could suffer through this 600 page biography and if my mom asked I could lie and say it was great; I could hope that she forgot she bought it for me and avoid lying that is was great; or I could say that I lost the book but I’m sure it would have been great.

But a funny thing happened while I planned a fake review signing the praises of this inevitable snooze fest.  It turned out that I didn’t have to pretend to like the book, because in the end it wasn’t that bad (and I swear, I’m not just saying that).  In fact, it was better than “not bad”; it ended up being a pretty fantastic read (and really, I’m not just saying that).

I’ll sum up my reasons for liking and highly recommending this biography in a few points:

Jobs is a fascinating character.  He could have been a fictional television character.  I mean, my god was he quirky.  Admittedly, I knew very little about Steve Jobs.  But I had no idea he was considered so mean to some people and had such mood swings.  Or about his weird vegan dietary habits (eating only apples for months?  drinking only carrot juice for weeks?).  Or that he was known for his bad hygiene (not showering regularly/using deodorant) in his earlier hippy days in the work force.  There was a ton of good stuff in here.

This was subject matter I was familiar with.  Although I’m slightly too young to remember the early days of Apple or even the big moment when the Macintosh was unveiled, I’ve lived through most of the history of Apple, both its ups and downs.  I own an iPod, I spend quality time every day with my iPhone, and I wrote this blog on our iMac.  So yeah, I’d say that Jobs and Apple are a big part of my life.  It was interesting to read the history of these products.

I learned a lot I didn’t know about Jobs, Apple, and his other ventures, including Pixar.  One thing that was interesting was illustrated in this quote, “He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future.”  Steve Jobs wasn’t engineering the computers or even inventing much of anything, but he was the driving force behind getting the products created and marketed.  I guess I always thought of him as more of a computer and technical guy and not quite the savvy businessman and marketing guy. 

Isaacson knows how to write a biography.  This book was well written, flowed like a story, and was never boring.  And it wasn’t just a celebration of Jobs, but an honest portrayal of a complicated and flawed man.  If anything, I was surprised by how negative some of it was towards Jobs.  I finished the book thoroughly torn by how to feel towards Jobs, who was both a genius innovator, and a selfish egomaniac.  The highest compliment I can play to Isaacson and this biography is that it made me interested in both checking out other biographies (adding to my classic, contemporary, nonfiction rotation) and in particular something else he himself has written. 

I read it on vacation, which of course made it much easier to plow through almost 600 pages (in hardback nonetheless).  Maybe I would have enjoyed it less if I was dragging the 10 pound book back and forth to work on the train and reading it 15 pages at a time.

But as it is, I give Steve Jobs a thumbs up.  The book, like the man, was fascinating.

Next up:  The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson