Steve Jobs

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Nonfiction 

“I wanted my kids to know me.”   

STEVE JOBS
By Walter Isaacson
656 pp. Simon & Schuster

Reviewed by Bob Sanchez

Without question, Apple's Steve Jobs will go down in history as one who brought technology and the arts together. Knowing this about himself and aware that he had cancer, he approached biographer and former Time editor Walter Isaacson to write his biography. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he later said. Isaacson at first thought the suggestion premature, but he agreed after realizing that Jobs's time might be running out.

The result of dozens of interviews with Jobs and his family and associates, Steve Jobs is a revealing look at the subject's many strengths and failings. A major theme of the book is Jobs's compelling personality, strength of will, and binary view of the world. Everyone Jobs encountered was in his view either a hero or a “shithead.” 

Everything he saw, every idea presented to him, was either amazing or it “sucked.” He had the biggest ideas for the direction of technology, yet controlled the smallest details. The inside of his products had to be just as beautiful as the outside, even though consumers were never allowed to open them.

Jobs's biological parents Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble were unmarried, and they gave their son up for adoption. Isaacson recounts the pain Jobs felt at his rejection as well as the love and nurture he received from his adoptive parents, Clara and Paul Jobs. As he entered his teens, he proved to be demanding, willful, and bright. His father Paul, a mechanic, instilled in him a love of perfection, simplicity, and attention to detail. But the drugs, including LSD, were Steve's own idea. Realizing that their son was smarter and stronger-willed than they were, the parents indulged him as much as they could.

Steve Jobs chronicles a fascinating life and career through Isaacson's solid research and writing. The spark of Jobs's career came, of course, when he and Steve Wozniak began tinkering with an Altair computer and created the Apple I. From the beginning, the dichotomy was clear: “Woz,” the engineering genius, would have happily shared their invention with the world for free; Jobs, the visionary and businessman, insisted on selling their work. Wozniak went his own way after the massive success of the Apple II, but the two Steves remained friends.

Isaacson clearly admires Jobs for his accomplishments, but Steve Jobs is no hagiography. Jobs said he wanted to be at “the intersection of humanities and science... Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do... People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” To achieve this, he drove Apple employees hard. Many of them spoke of his “reality distortion field,” where he could convince engineers to achieve feats they thought were impossible. And yet Apple's products could be “sublime,” Isaacson writes. “Sometimes it's nice to be in the hands of a control freak.”

Yet he had what many would see as massive character flaws, and he conceded that he was widely and accurately considered to be an “asshole” - his own word. “He was not a model boss or human being,” Isaacson writes. “Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair.” Some thought of Jobs's callousness as a “lack of emotional awareness,” but it was something else: “He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, and know how to relate to them, cajole them, or hurt them at will.” Ironically, while Jobs was a control freak in almost every other aspect of his work and life, he never asked to read or approve what Isaacson was writing about him. He said he knew that parts of the book would make him look bad, and he simply accepted the fact.

The result, Isaacson writes in his introduction:

is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. ... This is also, I hope, a book about innovation.

One of Isaacson's insights is that Jobs was not a man of exceptional intelligence. “Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.”

Most of us would not have lasted an hour working for a man like Steve Jobs, whom Isaacson places in a pantheon with Edison and Ford as one of the greatest businessmen ever. Jobs tolerated only the very best--the “A” players--and sometimes not even them. His attitude seemed to be that if you couldn't meet Apple's standards, you could always apply for a job at Microsoft.

Steve Jobs is an engrossing and accessible biography of a man you don't have to like to appreciate. I read it on my iPad, one of Jobs's last great products. It felt fitting.