Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson
Synopsis from www.borders.com.au
Based on more than 40 interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over 2 years as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues. The author 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 6 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, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Steve Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the 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 Steve Jobs co-operated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. Nothing was 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. 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.
Chris’ Review
 Yes I read alot but when you give me a book that is more than 250 pages long if you can’t hold my attention I will most likely put it aside and finish it later. Often sports book are filled with every game and detail of a career which for the big fan is great but fo rthe average fan a bit much. So when I picked up the life story of Steve Jobs and saw it was 600 pages long I wondered if being just an average fan if I would stay interested until the end.
Considering I have spent every spare moment going back to read the book it passes with flying colours. It is amazing to learn of the vision that Steve Jobs had way back in the 1980′s. His mind was ahead of his time and he just needed technology to catch up. What is also great about this book is that there is nothing held back. Steve Jobs knew that he was difficult, harsh and unfair on many people but reading the book makes me think that had he had been any diffirent Apple would not exist today and our technology would be nowhere near as advanced as it is.
The book is more about just Steve Jobs, his life is intertwined into so many great companies including Apple, Pixar, Disney and Microsoft and the music industry and so whilst reading you are not just reading a biography about one man but how he played a part in so many parts of our everyday life.
What makes the book even more interesting is that Steve Jobs gave permission for anything and everything to be printed. Nothing is sugar coated and various friends and rivals have their say on a man who would get emotion, manipulate and more often than not get his way. From the day he was born and then adopted out Steve Jobs was a very complex man and now that he is gone I wonder if anyone in the next forty years will have an impact on the world such as he did in the last forty.
