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Review: Becoming Steve Jobs
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MacNN Staff
Join Date: Jul 2012
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Becoming Steve Jobs is an engrossing account of the Apple CEO's life, and very specifically on his journey to becoming a businessman with art and style. It's not as well written as Leander Kahney's Jony Ive book but it's significantly better than Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography.
You already know that Apple bosses praise Becoming Steve Jobs and berate Isaacson's book. Yet the way that Apple has practically mounted its own PR campaign promoting this biography is as damaging as it is helpful. We'd have heard about the book anyway, and with Apple at its back, many buyers may suspect that the book will be a whitewash of Jobs, who is held in reverence among Apple executives.
It's not. It is more positive overall than Isaacson, but that comes from the authors' distinctly different approaches. Isaacson was straight-down-the-line journalism, and the writer himself generally kept a step away from his subject. Becoming Steve Jobs is a first-person account of a journalist who knew Jobs, and tangentially it's also his story. The book is credited to two writers, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, but it's written in the singular first-person, being the account of Schlender's years interviewing Jobs.
The positive side of this difference is that Becoming Steve Jobs feels closer to Jobs, and it's a more engaging, personal read. It does sometimes feel defensive, especially in the long opening section that rather over-justifies Schlender having written such a book. Yet Schlender is a journalist, and he has the detachment to write even-handedly, to the point where he praises Bill Gates enormously for various decisions and actions.
Curiously, Gates is an example of where Isaacson's approach in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography didn't just fail, it irritated. Regularly through his book, Isaacson would quote Jobs's opinion on a topic then, exactly as a true journalist should, he'd quote an alternative. Typically it would be Jobs saying something then Gates saying no, that's wrong. However, it felt that there was never an analysis, certainly never a third source chiming in, and so over and over, it would be as if Gates got the final word and therefore Gates was correct. When you knew something of the issue, and disagreed with Gates, it was an infuriating read.
Becoming Steve Jobs is far better in this respect, because Schlender and Tetzeli understand the computing industry much more than Isaacson appeared to. That's even a tent pole part of the book where Schlender recounts Jobs specifically asking him whether he knows this stuff at all.
So Becoming Steve Jobs is more personal, and it is more focused on this one strand of how Jobs developed from the young man pushed out of Apple to the revered figure he became. It's good at conveying computing issues, because its author better understands them, and moreover was there and writing about these points as they happened.
As a piece of writing, it isn't as strong as Leander Kahney's Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products. With that, you tend to forget you're reading a book, you're just so into the story -- whereas here with Becoming Steve Jobs, you're somehow always conscious that it is a constructed narrative. You can feel the work that went into it, where Kahney makes the Ive book seem effortless.
Becoming Steve Jobs is available on iBooks where it costs $13 and Kindle, paperback and hardback through Amazon from $13 to $20.
-- William Gallagher ( @WGallagher)
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Last edited by NewsPoster; Mar 24, 2015 at 12:48 PM.
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Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Jul 2006
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Major Point: If Apple's senior leadership considers this book so special, they should mark its release in a special way, perhaps by giving $5 from each sale in his name to pancreatic cancer research. I have a brother-in-law who is battling the disease. It is a terrible disease. Much more needs to be done.
Minor Point: Amazon's prices for this book don't range "from $13 to 20." The Kindle edition is $11.99, a dollar less than that at the iBookstore. That's not even marked as a discount. Random House apparently priced the two versions differently. Their files sizes are different. Amazon's is 18.5 MB. That on the iBookstore is 20.9 MB.
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Author of Untangling Tolkien and Chesterton on War and Peace
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: Maitland, FL
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Inkling: you are incorrect. As clearly stated in the article, the price of the book on Amazon depends on whether you are getting the e-book, the softbound or the hardbound. Thus, there is a range of prices to pay for a copy. I don't know how the reviewer could have made that any clearer, or how you managed to misunderstand that.
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Charles Martin
MacNN Editor
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Managing Editor
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The ebook price at Amazon has varied a few times today.
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
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I think everything surrounding this book smacks of Apple PR. It is released three and a half years after the Isaacson book, which is enough time to think it was started as a reaction to the Isaacson book. It has had the full cooperation of the Apple executive board which is almost unprecedented. They have been doing PR for the book, even with articles in Forbes a few weeks ago that didn't reference the book yet focused almost exclusively on Jobs' legacy.
This book is a rebuttal to the Isaacson book by Apple. They didn't like how their most important commodity, the Legacy of Steve Jobs, was depicted in that book, even if it was done at his request. So, this is their revised and preferred version of Jobs that they want the world to go by.
It's marketing, even if Jobs wanted the Isaacson book to be warts and all. I wonder how Jobs would have felt if he knew his executives tried to trump the book he asked to have written with their own version of his history.
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I find people reaction to this book to be amusing. Apparently, if the book isn't a steaming pile of excrement like the Isaacson book and it's received positively by Apple execs, it must have been commissioned by Apple, etc. Isaacson had the same level of access and more, but he blew it. Isaacson's book was lazy. It simply rehashed old folklore that had already been told 1000 times. Worse, it was written by an industry outsider who apparently had no account of what happened in the tech industry over the years. It was riddled with inaccuracies and worst of all, it was a missed opportunity. Isaacson completely glossed over the Next and Pixar years and never really touched on Jobs maturing as a product visionary. Isaacson's account was extremely disappointing. Is it any wonder someone else has written a book to help set the record straight?
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Grizzled Veteran
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So hard to tell whether I need my tinfoil hat on or off while reading these comments...
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
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I'm not claiming the new book is bad or inaccurate. I'm just looking at how Apple the company is treating the release of this book. The way they are treating this book is unprecedented both in their cooperation for the content and their PR push to raise it above the Isaacson book. Those are the facts of what is happening here.
Isaacson's book was done before Jobs died and, since Jobs was the impetus behind the book in the first place (authorized biography), he surely would have had input on the books content. He did not stop the book from being released.
The fact that Apple decided to dismiss Steve's approved book completely and push this one? Given the timing, the cooperation, the PR push, the dismissal, this doesn't feel like an agenda?
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