Petra's Reviews > Steve Jobs

Oh my, I finished it! I started losing hope this day would ever come :D But once I let myself be sucked into the book, it took less time than expected.

I feel like lately, I´ve been raving about all the books I´ve read but I do not give a damn and this can´t be helped. It is a briliant book! It is, I swear. It´s not that I like everything I read, it´s just that I´ve been choosing my books well recently.

This book deserves the five stars for the way it was written. This is a biography and there is a big potential for being excrutiatingly boring with this type of a book. It a bio´s not written well, it can be a mere list of accomplishments without any emotion. That does not happen here (although, there is a list of accomplishments at the end of this book that sums up the inventions of Steve and it´s astonishing), thanks to the many interviews and the years Isaacson spent with the Jobs family, I consider this an accurate description. It made me laugh on multiple occasions - not just because Steve was just being an arrogant asshole as usual - but thanks to the wit of the writer who knows how to phrase certain things and the puns and the sarcasm make you laugh.

Since I consider the most interesting period to be the years between 1990 and 2011, that was the fast-paced part of the book for me. It was intriguing to read about the thinking of Steve and other Apple employees (mostly Jony Ive, whom, let´s be honest here, I hadn´t heard of before) when they were trying to come up with something new against all odds, never knowing if it´d be successful. It´s funny to read that kind of stuff when you live in 2014 and you know they were successful indeed. Extremely so. I had chills when reading about the iTunes and them thinking they missed the opportunity with mp3 players and burning CDs because Steve decided to concentrate on iMovie rather than music. At that point, they had to do something to catch up to competition and to be better than most. Well, they did :D And it´s fun to read it now.

Steve Jobs definitely was an interesting subject for a bio, his life hauntingly interesting. The last years of his life and his demise made me cry a lot - also beautifully written chapters. That´s where the emotion comes in. One of the last chapters shows his last CEO meeting and stepping down and when the board members cried, so did I. On the subject of Steve, I believed he was this genius who did no wrong. Well, how wrong were my assumptions :D His personality, as portrayed here and I now believe it was true, was terrible. His temper unbearable and I believe his wife had to be a saint. BUT as a businessman, he stands as the archetype of the American dream as far as I´m concerned. It is unbelievable what things he´d achieved and, as I´m not a genius myself, I will never be able to wrap my head around some stuff. Also, after finishing this book, I had this need to buy all Apple products because of what they stand for. Well, that´s not exactly financially responsible...or possible for me, either :D

Oh, and one more thing... (that was chilling when that was used as a chapter title, I started crying uncontrollably - yes, I´m an emotional mess, get it..) The book flowed seamlessly, the chapters interconnected, there were time jumps and each topic got its own chapter..but it was all done so naturally, I have to do my imaginary hat thing to Walter Isaacson. Even the tension was built amazingly (as demonstrated in the transition between the illness-related chapters and the iPhone, iPad and iCloud ones. Chilling, yet again. Yes, there was tension in a bio. That´s what I´m telling you. This is a wonderful bio. Go read it!