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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 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, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in 21st 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 the author, he asked for no control over what was written. 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.
Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 24, 2011 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781442346284
- File size: 722346 KB
- Duration: 25:04:53
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- Lexile® Measure: 1080
- Text Difficulty: 7-9
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Reviews
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This authorized, highly discussed work delivers significant details of Jobs's secretive life, career, and creative sensibility. The author delivers his introduction. Formerly in leadership roles at CNN and TIME magazine, Isaacson has created a well-researched and balanced biography that emphasizes Jobs's mammoth ambition, genius, and brutal honesty. Dylan Baker's earnestness is expressed in a workmanlike narration. His style is not well matched to the urgency of Jobs's fascinating life story and the relentlessness of his personality. Without vocal characterizations, Baker's pacing is consistent, if too slow. Perhaps an unfortunate, if unspoken, message is that, with great genius, boorish behavior with staff, family, and others may ultimately lead to phenomenal innovative and artful business success. W.A.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine -
December 19, 2011
If not the greatest of computer moguls, the late Apple Computer co-founder was certainly the most colorful and charismatic to judge by this compelling biography. Journalist Isaacson (Albert Einstein) had his subject's intimate cooperation but doesn't shy away from Jobs's off-putting traits: the egomania; the shameless theft of ideas; the "reality distortion field" of lies and delusions; the veering between manipulative charm and cold betrayal; the bullying rages, profanity and weeping; the bizarre vegetarian diets that he believed would ward off body odor and cancer (he was tragically wrong on both counts). Isaacson also sees the constructive flip-side of Jobs's flaws, arguing that his crazed perfectionism and sublime sense of designâhe wanted even his computers' circuit boards to be visually elegantâbegat brilliant innovations, from the Mac to the iPad, that blended "poetry and processors." The author oversells Jobs as the digital artiste pitting well-crafted, vertically integrated personal computing experiences against the promiscuously licensed, bulk-commodity software profferred by his Microsoft rival Bill Gates. (Gates's acerbic commentary on Jobs's romanticism often steals the page.) Still, Isaacson's exhaustively researched but well-paced, candid and gripping narrative gives us a great warts-and-all portrait of an entrepreneurial spiritâand one of the best accounts yet of the human side of the computer biz. Photos.
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