Steve Jobs Biography Review

"All progress depends on the unreasonable man" George Bernard Shaw wrote in "Maxims for Revolutionaries", a part of the preface to his play Man and Superman. Person who has read about Steve Jobs, during the last 40 years is likely to need Walter Isaacson has over 600 pages to convince them that Steve Jobs was a very unreasonable. 

Parts of this folly are legendary. The insistence on the perfection of the design details inside the tiny boxes of Apple computer that no one would ever see. The staging that turned the launch of Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad cultural references. The intransigence that got him ousted from his own company and, a decade later, saw him return to make a success of it (and Pixar). The hippie phase in which he took a trip to India and experimented with LSD. The refusal to grant early supporter of Apple shares. Much of this material has already been documented, particularly in the books of Steven Levy.
Other parts are less well known. Jobs would have lived longer if he had not resisted the surgery for several months. Instead, he tried to beat his cancer with a range of non-medical treatments, including variations on fad diets he experimented for much of his life. It could, Isaacson writes, eat only salad of carrots, for example, for weeks at a time, or just fast. These eating disorders (Isaacson characterization) finally made it harder for him to ingest the protein he needs while he is sick. But being unreasonable helped, too: for the last years of his life he worked with the physical pain caused by her cancer recurring. 

This biography was the idea of ​​Jobs. He proposed, Isaacson discovered later, shortly before his first cancer surgery. Both jobs Isaacson and his wife promised a free hand - his wife Isaacson encouraged to report on the subject, warts and all. Jobs only intervention other than the provision of more than 40 interviews over two years has been to insist on replacing the first publisher to test a cover design. Isaacson has also interviewed dozens of employees jobs and industry figures, and cites the many books written about Apple over the years, and hundreds of articles and speeches.
It is difficult to know which parts of the job could have objected to the book: would he have found some tiny imperfection in the accounts of the battles conference room, creating the Mac, iPhone or iPad? Or would it have been chagrined to read, once again, on his thorny relationship with his eldest daughter Lisa, whose existence has been slow to accept? It would be fair to say that people grow and learn better - he was 23 when she was born. Yet in 2010, youngest daughter of Jobs, then barely 16 years old, tells Isaacson's OK that his father does not know (but not, as Isaacson's just an ordinary, his son): "Sometimes I wish I had more attention, but I know the work he does is very important and I think it's really cool, so I'm fine. I do not really need more attention. " 
Any journalist who has dealt with Apple over the years knows that it can be difficult to convince the company to part with information. Disease Jobs is a particularly relevant example in this regard: he resisted public disclosure of his health problems, despite his responsibilities as CEO of a public company. When, in March 2008, Fortune magazine under a piece entitled "The Trouble with Steve Jobs to discuss these issues, writes Isaacson," editor Jobs called Fortune, Andy Serwer, in Cupertino for him under pressure to spike. He leaned Serwer is face and asked, 'So you've discovered that I am an asshole. Why is that news? "
When someone dies, for the living, they can suddenly snap into focus as a full four-dimensional being. In the first application in 2004, Isaacson, refused to write the biography of employment until the end of his career, perhaps a couple of decades. As it happens, the book ends with the retirement of Jobs from Apple in August and some thoughts about the switch: it is four-dimensional complete.