Steve Jobs

I was somewhat intimidated by the thickness of the book and spooked by Jobs' infamous death stare and enigmatic Mona Lisa-like smile.  The cover portrait, by Albert Watson who is kind of blind and bears an uncanny resemblance to his subject, was taken using an analog large format camera of which Jobs was duly impressed.  I took the dust cover off before started reading.

The authorized biography by the renowned Walter Isaacson clocks in more than 600 pages with never seen before obligatory pictures of Jobs and families in the middle and notes in the end.  I thought it would take me some time to finish it but no, it only took me more than a week even though I had been extremely busy between eating my meals and using the bathrooms.

The book chronicles Jobs' personal and professional life, warts and all, through and through with vivid recollections from Jobs himself as well as from others and often time interspersed with Isaacson's own take on the events.  The Book of Jobs certainly confirms Jobs as an enigmatic dichotomy.  He couldn't code like Gates, not a brilliant engineer like Wozniak, but what he lacked he more than made up for with his intuition, his belief in himself being special and his relentless drive demanded from himself and others for perfection.  And of course being exceptionally intelligent helped too.  Isaacson is even handed and sometimes even goes overboard to expose Jobs' dark side or quirks.  He insinuates that Jobs was too busy to flush toilets in addition to his more well-known infractions: Job soaked his feet in the toilet bowl to unwind, cheated Wozniak, abandoned his own child, had no qualms took others' ideas as his and totally lacked social grace.  Despite or perhaps even because of all his faults, it makes Jobs even more fascinating or human--apparently Jobs reality distortion field is at work here, death or alive.  In the end, Isaacson sheds his biographer role and let Jobs have the last words, which are intelligent and thoughtful as always but also uncharacteristically graceful: summing up who he is, what he wants to do and what drives him, all directly from the horse's mouth.   The book is compelling and easy to read, because number one Jobs was a compelling person on so many levels, with spectacular successes and failures, and you will have to make an effort if you were to try to make him less compelling and number two Isaacson's chronological recounting of events is easy to follow and not get in the way of the flow of the story.  It's not easy to sum up anybody's life in a book especially one as fascinating as Jobs' but I believe Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" has done it.