Steve Jobs

By: Walter Isaacson

Narrated by: Dylan Baker

Length: 25 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

Featuring a new epilogue read by the author.

From the author of the best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive biography of Steve Jobs.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the 21st century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple's hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

©2011 Walter Isaacson (P)2011 Simon & Schuster

Interesting and revealing

I enjoyed this book for its realistic look at the life, accomplishments and personality of Steve Jobs. A biography can never fully capture who someone really is because it is always filtered through the writer and others, but this one felt real and was unflinching in telling the good with the not so good. I feel like I got a bit of an idea of who Steve Jobs really was. Complicated, amazing and uncompromising,loving and sometimes a jerk. He was also a genius. There are not many who have lived who have changed the world like he did. I really enjoyed this book.

Cannot Get Enough of This Book

If you want to be inspired listen to this book. If you want to change the world, listen to this book.

simply perfect

I totally felt this book and at the very end developed a serious relationship with Steve as though he was my relative. Beautifully written ..couldn't have imagined better.

Insight into the world of an American treasure

Walter Isaacson does a masterful job of detailing the very meaningful life of a true American icon. Steve Jobs’s insistence for excellence in functionality and design made Apple products, Pixar productions, and most everything he touched generationally great. Isaacson’s unfiltered account of Jobs was welcomed, as it painted the full picture of the man and his work. Dylan Baker’s narration was well done. I highly recommend this audiobook.

Very interesting man

This was an amazing story I am not a tech guy and never paid much attention to the apple story, after listening to this I wish I paid more attention! Great book !

Long but worth the listen. Tons of nuggets.

Just jammed packed full of Steve Job's life. Both nuggets and contention in this book.

One of the best Biographical books I've read

I like the way they talk deeply about Job's personality and way of thinking. The way the story is structured makes it easy to understand. The narration is really good

Best Biographer I’ve Read

Walter Isaacson is a wonderful wordsmith, and tells a story with a point of view. He seeks themes in his recounting of past events and invites the reader to make deeper connections to the people he has written about.

A great American story and genius that I wish received a better treatment

This is a very good book, but it’s a few bricks shy of the load that would make it a great book.
While the book has many goods insights and is a good read, the author is at once distant from Jobs while also being somehow deferential to him. Jobs reality distortion technique seems mostly the not-very-unusual CEO demand that things and deadline must be met way before any rational person could think possible. Or to put in another way, to make the genius of Steve jobs disproportionately dependent on his demands to meet early deadlines, diminishes Jobs. Too much emphasis on this.
Also, the reader did not convey the level of understanding or subtlety the book needed and really demanded.
Basically the whole project, while still well worth a read or listen, makes me wonder if it would have been better in the hands of a novelist.
John

Great book about a fascinating individual

If you want to see why Steve Jobs was the man who changed the world, this is a great way to get in the mind of the man.