Biography

I have always believed that reading biographies is an interesting way in which to engage with history. Similarly, autobiographies, though way less objective obviously, provide us with another avenue into history in the making. With that brief assertion out of the way, I wish to review Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, and it is certainly an ideal way to read about the history of the development of the personal computer literally blow by blow.

Isaacson is a superb writer, who was personally sought out by Jobs to be his official biographer, seemingly after he had learned that given his diagnosis of cancer he would not have too long left to live.  Though that fact was initially unknown to Isaacson, or anyone else indeed, he eventually agreed to take on the task despite some initial misgivings. Isaacson, Jobs knew, was an accomplished, learned, and objective biographer who had already written acclaimed biographies of Einstein, Franklin and Kissinger.

If you are interested in what makes a successful and powerful entrepreneur, then this is the book for you. And even if you are only remotely interested in the world of computers, this book makes the central area of modern communications come alive in the most personal and interpersonal of ways by describing in a blow-by-blow account the development of the iMac, the iPad, the iPod - in short, the opening up of the whole universe of communications at the touch of a screen neatly designed to be customer-friendly, trendy and stylish, as well as infinitely practical and useful.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955, in San Francisco, and was immediately put up for adoption due to family circumstances. He came of age in the early days of Silicon Valley, a place where "even the ne'er-do-wells tended to be engineers." His adoptive parents indulged his passion for electronics and general tinkering and promised his birth mother that they would send him to college, where unfortunately, or fortunately for us perhaps, he would last only one year.  He returned to the Bay Area and took a job with the seminal video game entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell at Atari.  While working there Jobs saved enough money for a pilgrimage for six months to India, and seriously considered moving to Japan to train as a Buddhist monk. But his Los Altos Zen master, the late Cobun Chino Otogawa, persuaded him to stay in Silicon Valley, where he founded Apple Computer instead.

Immediately one gets a sense, then, of how complex a person  Steve Jobs was: on the one hand a meditator in the Japanese Zen mode and on the other a hardened capitalist.  This book attempts to capture and explain that complexity, and its author manages to do so admirably. Here we are much indebted to Isaacson. 

Jobs is portrayed throughout the book as a difficult, stubborn, and arrogant man, all too prone to chiding his fellow workers with tirades of verbal abuse (replete with expletives) and he was reported to throw tantrums and even cry when he did not get his way.  It is very hard to square this with his guru-like portrayal in the media over the years.  One gets the feeling that there was an internal struggle going on between the Ego and the Real or true Self at the heart of his psyche and that the former always got the upper hand, and yet traces of the austere guru lingered long about his persona.  For a man obsessed with control of his product, the fact that he allowed Isaacson complete control over telling his story in his own way "warts and all" is a tribute to the finer, more spiritual side of this eccentric entrepreneur.    Indeed, there is a morbid joke mentioned several times in the biography: Jobs said he wouldn't even read the book until a year after it was published. He knew that spreading pancreatic cancer was going to kill him well before that year was up - his impending death gives the biography a visceral poignancy and proximity - and, moreover, Jobs died a few weeks before the book was even published, on Oct. 24, 2011.  In a reminder of his more Zen-perfectionist drive for excellence and perfection of design at Apple, his only control over his biography was his choice of the pictures for the front and back covers of the jacket of the hardback edition.  The front cover uses a photographic portrait of Jobs commissioned by Fortune magazine in 2006 for a portfolio of powerful people. That photograph was taken by Albert Watson. When the photograph was taken, Watson said he insisted on having a three-hour sitting.  The photographer later said of that working session with Jobs: "If you look at that shot, you can see the intensity. It was my intention that by looking at him, you knew that this guy was smart. I heard later that it was his favorite photograph of all time."

What interests this reader about the great Steve Jobs is the fact that he was that rarer of entrepreneurs who managed to straddle the twin worlds of the sciences and the humanities:

"I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but liked electronics," he said.  "Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that that's what I wanted to do."  It was as if he was suggesting themes for his biography (and, in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid).  The creativity that can occur when a feel  for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century." (p. xix).

That people see life (or in more philosophical terms, reality) in uniquely different ways would seem to be a truism to this reviewer.  Was it Carl Jung, quoting Kant, who said that we see things not as they are but as we are?  That Steve Jobs had a vision for his great unique, ground-breaking, and revolutionary company Apple, is also beyond doubt to this writer.  He was a driven man with an obsessive vision for the modern personal computer which would be both the epitome of good design (the humanities) and usefulness (the sciences).  Even though we might not like their methods, and, like Steve Wozniak, we might have a far more polite and respectful way of working with and treating others, perhaps we need the drive of entrepreneurs like Jobs.  Such a drive will let nothing stand in the way of success and excellence so that society as a whole may progress.

This reviewer has one or two small complaints about this otherwise wonderful biography. Firstly, the chapters on Jobs' romantic encounters and later family life sit somewhat uncomfortably in the middle of the book and seem to break what is the stricter chronological flow and order of the narrative. Secondly, Isaacson's somewhat cursory treatment of the animation studio Pixar, beginning with Jobs' purchase of the division from Lucasfilm, feels similarly misplaced. Furthermore, it is also hard enough for this reader to keep track of everyone at Apple without also having to remember the staff at Pixar and the sad corporate shenanigans at Disney. 

However, it is at the interface of the development of Apple's wonderful products with Jobs' intuitive understanding of the needs of the purchasing public that is the strongest vein of interest in this book.  We proceed step-by-step through the development of the now-famous progression of i-products that saved Apple from the brink of insolvency: the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and the iPad, all of which have become household names as common as refrigerator and washing machine were to previous generations. Watching Jobs and his lieutenants bring forth that improbable string of hits is a real treat for every reader with even a passing interest in the history of modern times.

Let me finish with a quote from the author of this biography, Walter Isaacson when interviewed more recently by The Washington Post's Sally Quinn.  His comment is deeply relevant to anyone with a passion for life, for philosophy, or for making some sense of the project of life itself:

I do think it’s [spirituality] important, if you’re going to be very creative, to be a seeker. And Steve Jobs believed his whole life that he was on a journey, a journey for enlightenment. And he said you’re never going to achieve all the answers, or perfect enlightenment, but that the journey is the reward. Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it’s the reward for being a seeker in this world. Steve was not conventionally religious because he was very unsure. He said, “I’ll never know the answer. It’s the great mystery.” But he at least knew it was a great mystery instead of dismissing the whole notion of a quest.

The Journey was indeed Jobs's reward - a journey, which is so well described in Isaacson's book.