Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is an insightful and deeply personal journey through the astonishing life of Jobs. Isaacson had previously written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Henry Kissinger. Isaacson interviewed Jobs over forty times over a two year period, which was inadvertently just before Jobs’ death. He also spent a considerable amount of time with Job’s family, friends and colleagues, which permitted Isaacson to build an accurate account of Jobs’ journey from childhood through to just before his death. Early on in the biography, it is revealed that as a child, Job’s spent time with his father, learning about the process of building and manufacturing, where his father insisted that the parts of a product that people cannot see need to have as much attention to detail as the parts you can see. This early lesson became the driving force behind Job’s inexorable desire to ensure all components of Apple products were designed and manufactured to the highest standard, all the way down to the motherboard and processors, even though consumers would never see many of these design feats. It became apparent early on that Jobs was destined to flourish in the world of computers and technology, growing up in Silicon Valley, attending high school classes dedicated to building electronics, and having a summer job when he was 13 years old, along side Bill Hewlett at HP. Soon after this summer job, he met and became close friends with Steve Wozniak. However, it wasn’t until after Jobs worked for the then pioneering gaming company Atari, that he and Woz founded Apple Computers. The biography accurately tracks the progress of Apple, Next and Pixar, where both Jobs’ failures and successes steered him on a course that would lead him back to Apple in 1996, and ultimately lead to Apple becoming a technology company, rather than a computer company, and ultimately, the largest public company in the world. Isaacson’s depiction of Jobs’ ferocious and erratic behaviour evokes an image of a man who was deeply passionate about the creation of beautiful consumer products, so passionate that at times, it was clear he allowed no room for errors or anything less than perfection. Walter Isaacson’s writing is easy to read, highly entertaining and he has created a vital historical document of a true pioneer in our modern age.
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June 2018
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