Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson’s Authorised Biography of the Ultimate Icon of Inventiveness
Written by Walter Isaacson, former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, Steve Jobs (2011) is not only the most detailed and accurate book about Jobs’s life but also the only authorised one, since Isaacson wrote it with Jobs’s cooperation.
Author: Walter Isaacson
Title: Steve Jobs (2011)
Format: English Kindle edition (Little, Brown)
Scope: Authorised biography based on more than forty interviews with Jobs
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B005J3IEZQ (ASIN B005J3IEZQ)
The Biographer
The journalist and historian Walter Isaacson is best known in literary circles for masterful biographies: rigorously researched, meticulous and yet immensely entertaining. His other books include Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Einstein: His Life and Universe and Leonardo da Vinci.
Six Industries
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs over two years, as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues, Isaacson has written a riveting story of the life of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionised six industries: personal computers, animated films, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.
At a time 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, and he built a company where leaps of imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
A Life in Brief
Born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted as a baby by Paul and Clara Jobs, Steve Jobs founded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. The Macintosh arrived in 1984; a year later, after a boardroom battle, Jobs was forced out of his own company. In exile he founded NeXT and bought the small computer-graphics division that became Pixar, which produced Toy Story in 1995. Apple bought NeXT and brought him back in 1997, and in the following years came the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.
The Reality Distortion Field
Isaacson does not flatter his subject. Colleagues describe Jobs’s "reality distortion field", his ability to convince himself and others that impossible deadlines could be met, which sometimes produced miracles and sometimes humiliated people. The book recounts his cruelty to employees, his difficult relationship with his first daughter, Lisa, and his decision to delay surgery for his pancreatic cancer while trying alternative treatments. Against these stand his taste, his obsession with simplicity and the connection he drew between technology and the humanities.
Written Against the Clock
Jobs asked Isaacson to write the book, and the interviews took place while he was already seriously ill. He died on 5 October 2011, and the biography was published later that month. Some people close to Jobs, including Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook, later said they felt it did not capture the man they knew, and a more sympathetic portrait appeared in 2015 in Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Isaacson’s book also served as a source for the 2015 film Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin.
Who Should Read It
Entrepreneurs, designers and anyone interested in how the devices in our pockets came to be. It is long, but Isaacson keeps the story moving, and the reviewer’s point stands: it is the definitive account.
Nothing Off Limits
Although Jobs cooperated with the book, he asked for no control over what was written, not even the right to read it before publication. He put nothing off limits and encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. Jobs himself speaks candidly, sometimes brutally, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes and colleagues give 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.
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