Steve Jobs
Written by Walter Isaacson
Narrated by Walter Isaacson and Dylan Baker
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Featuring a new epilogue read by the author.
From the author of the best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive biography of Steve Jobs.
Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred 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, and 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 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 this book, 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.
Reviews for Steve Jobs
843 ratings206 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Interesting biography. I found much to admire about the man and a few things I wouldn't emulate.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5good read. great story. may lack technical details, but we already knew those. I wanted and got the story of the man who changed the technology world.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I am by no means much of a fan of Apple or Apple-products. However, this was a really interesting read. There are some parts, or rather a specific chunk, of this book I found to be really boring, but it was more than worth going through for the sake of the rest. No matter what one may think of him, Steve Jobs was an extremely influential person in the consumer electronics-market. As well as giving what seems like a very honest description of the kind of person Steve Jobs was, this book also gives a fascinating insight in how Apple operates, why it does what it does, and how this has made the company so successful.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5With his biography of Steve Jobs, Isaacson manages something that is not easy - he creates a balanced account of a man who was anything but balanced. Portraying the life of a troubled genius with serious social issues runs the risk of becoming either a skewering or the work of a fanboy. Instead, Isaacson avoids both most of the time and shows us the amazing life of an amazing figure who created not one, but two of the most iconic companies of this century - Apple and Pixar. Much like his subject, Isaacson's Steve Jobs isn't perfect. The book gets off to a slow start and he repeats himself often, rehashing accounts that he had already hit on. He also changed us from a chronological structure to a topical one about halfway through, which was a bit confusing. However, as a whole this is a very well written biography that benefits from a close relationship between the author and the subject that with the passing of Steve Jobs won't be repeatable. When it comes to his life, this will be the definitive guide.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I have to hand it to Walter Isaacson. He was commissioned by Jobs to write a warts-and-all biography, and he absolutely followed through. The portrait of Jobs he paints here is that of a man who somehow managed to combine some of the worst traits of capitalist and hippie, a man who was, frankly, a colossal ass. Although, admittedly, a colossal ass with with a real eye for design and a certain amount of vision. (And I can't deny it, I do love my iPod.)As I was reading this, especially the earlier chapters, in which the focus was more on Jobs's personality than his not-yet-fully-realized technology empire, I kept thinking that I was going to end up rating this book lower than I actually have, just because I found spending time with its subject, however vicariously, to be simply too unpleasant. But in the end, I couldn't do it. Isaacson's skills as a biographer are so good, and the details of Jobs's career are so interesting, that it turned out to be an entirely worthwhile read, after all.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow! Isaacson captures the essence of this most complicated, gifted, forward looking genius. For me, Steve Jobs was to modern technology what Mozart and Beethoven were to music, what Einstein was to physics, what Michelangelo was to art... a fantastic read!