James R.'s Reviews > Steve Jobs

This book tells the story of Steve Jobs life. Walter Isaacson digs deep and gives an honest assessment of Jobs, told from a variety of angles, including the people that didn't like Steve very much.

That's one of the things I find so interesting about Steve Jobs, he was clearly a great man but it seems pretty obvious from this book that he wasn't a nice man. He was very difficult to be around but he managed to get some people to produce their best work and managed to pull together that work into coherent and usually excellent work.

He also failed at a lot of things too but always get going and started on something new. His life was interesting and full of ups and downs but he was always a bit of tryant.

The book tells the story of Steven Jobs life in more or less chronological order, starting with his childhood and ending with his untimely death a few years ago. There's potential for the life-story of a successful businessman to be boring but it's always interesting and there's lots of insight from the people Isaacson interviews.

Some sections felt a little bit padded out and it could perhaps have been done a bit more concisely - there are only so many stories you can hear about Jobs falling out with some executive or other before they start to blur into one.

The concept of Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field" is intereting though. So many of the people that contributed to the book commented on his ability to bend reality to his will when he was dealing with people. Sometimes this would involve him lying to people's faces, other times it would be demanding more from people than they thought they could give. It was part of why he was an bad person to work with but also why he acheived so much.

Another subject the book covers well is how much did Steve Jobs actually acheive himself and how much was the work of other people. He had the ability to find more skilled people than him and then market their work for them. Is that a skill in and of itself? It's hard to say but the book does dig into this and Steve Wozniak and Jony Ives both talk about Steve getting credit for their work.

So the book is generally very good, it's probably not going to be of interest to you if you don't like technology and specifically Apple but assuming these are interesting to you then this book is a great read.