"Steve Jobs"

by Walter Isaacson

In December Walter Isaacson author of the bestselling biography ‘Steve Jobs’ came to Kansas City through the efforts of Rainy Day Books. During the presentation he covered many aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality (most of which I was already aware) however when he revealed that Jobs on a regular basis parked in handicap parking there was an audible gasp throughout the audience. Listen, people might disagree on politics, religion, and what local restaurant serves the best burgers, but EVERYONE believes parking in handicap parking when you yourself aren’t is eighteen degrees of plain wrong!

Isaacson emphasized that Jobs was a man who didn’t believe the rules applied to him. Ergo he created, and later headed, a company that developed some of the greatest devices that have emerged on the world scene in the last century. The downside to the whole special snowflake philosophy is that Jobs parked in handicap spaces and drove his car around Palo Alto, California without license plates.

I confess that I jumped on the Apple bandwagon only recently, but once aboard it has been a true sparkly vampire Team Edward love affair. I got an iPhone early last fall when the 4S was being released and the 3G versions were being discounted. Since technology and I have at times had a rocky relationship I was uncertain how I would feel about my new device. In the past I always thought of my mobile phone as a necessary evil. However within hours after being introduced to my iPhone, Mr. Bojangles, I was downloading games and music. I was giddy with the power and knowledge that I would never be bored again…as long as my battery was charged. Now every night I make sure my phone is tucked into its charger and it is the first thing I reach for upon waking because finding out the time and temperature through any other means seems passé. Therefore when Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011 I felt a pinch over losing someone who I had only recently learned to admire.

While in the early stages of writing ‘Einstein: His Life and Universe’ and promoting ‘Ben Franklin: An American Life’ in 2004 Jobs approached Isaacson on writing his biography. They shared a joke about the hubris of Jobs suggesting himself as the natural successor to Einstein and Franklin. Isaacson proposed that since Jobs was, in what Isaacson presumed, the middle of his career that a biography might be best saved for two decades in the future. What he did not know was that Jobs was on the verge of his first operation for pancreatic cancer. In 2009 Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell, contacted Isaacson telling him that if he was still interesting in doing the book that the time to begin was then.

Jobs agreed to over forty interviews along with encouraging all family members, friends, and adversaries alike to give their true feelings and opinions. Jobs had no control of the content and declined to read the book. The only thing he suggested was a change of cover. As proven in the past, his eye was correct in choosing the Albert Watson photograph (taken in 2006) instead of the image approved by Simon and Schuster. The title was originally proposed ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs’ but thankfully Isaacson’s wife and daughter talked him out of that on the basis that they thought “it was too cutesy.” The original publishing date was set for March of 2012, but because of Jobs’ ill health it was pushed up to November of 2011. The book was then released on October 24, 2011 prompted by Jobs’ death.

After reading ‘Steve Jobs’ I’m left with a major admiration (outside of all of his accomplishments in technology and business) for Jobs’ planning and bravery in taking the vacuum he knew his death would create and filling it with his words and the thoughts of others about him. He knew after the eulogies were given people would start talking about how he could be verbally abusive, brattish, unnecessarily rude, and cruel.

One of the many geniuses of Jobs was pursuing the idea that what a company needs to do is anticipate what people will want and need in the future. He never used market research because he believed the masses don’t really know what they want until innovation shows them.

I think it was this sort of intuition which led him to work with a biographer when he was in and out of ill health. Even though he didn’t technically control the information, he exerted control by being interviewed. By giving Isaacson the names of who to interview he could respond to their feelings during his interview process, and by timing the biography to come out while his death was still in (if you will) the Honeymoon period of awe and praise he laid out all of his accomplishments and turpitudes on the table. Granted, I do not know if he was the one who encouraged pushing up the release dates, but from a marketplace perspective it was BAM!: Steve Jobs has died…then less than a month later the definitive biography about him was released. It was as if to insure the conversation wouldn’t skew negatively with revelations (Gawker, a website that Isaacson referenced in the biography, ran this article two days after Jobs’ death) he needed to do something big. Jobs knew his sins (and parking habits) would all be brought to light so the best way to help protect his legacy (both as a person and the company he created) was to explain who he was and why he did what he did – the good, the bad, the innovative and to a lesser degree the ugly.

‘Steve Jobs’ is an important book which will likely become more important as time moves on and future generations examine this era’s history. Other biographies will be written about Jobs but none of their authors will ever have the access Isaacson had to the source. They may listen to the interviews Isaacson conducted (assuming they were recorded) and they may examine different facets of the man and his creations, but the time for posing questions to Jobs is over.

One of the most striking things about the biography is that it feels as if it is Jobs' final product. His choice of photo is now iconic (as I’m sure intuitively he knew it would be) even the paper the book cover is made of makes a statement that other covers of biographies do not (I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t the same paper that covers boxes iPads come in). Jobs was far from perfect, obviously none of us are, however despite his imperfections and belief that the rules didn’t apply to him, I found his biography inspirational. He took his impending death and made it a dais to record his view of the world for prosperity. And although Isaacson doesn’t cover it, I oddly found comfort as he transitioned from this life to the next. His biological sister, writer Mona Simpson (Jobs was adopted and met Simpson when they were both adults) reported his final words were, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

Reviewed by Lisa Westerfield

Einstein: His Life and Universe

By Walter Isaacson

I’m not a fan of biographies, finding them tediously filled with trivial references and unnecessary detail. However, this book by the author of previous works on Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger held my interest throughout, mainly because it deals with areas of fascination to me – modern physics, human characterlogical glimpses, and analysis of the subject’s philosophical convictions.
It is extraordinarily well written and highly readable. The text flows relatively seamlessly; the only jarring note was the occasional “flashback” to earlier situations and incidents (these were probably necessary to give a contextual framework to the topic at hand). The editing seems flawless, and the author’s use of the language is superb; his background as an experienced reporter and media expert is obvious.
This reviewer was especially impressed with the unobtrusive yet comprehensive system of reference citations. Thankfully there are a relatively limited number of asterisked footnotes, and the voluminous numbered citations are indexed to a “Notes” section at the end of the book organized by groups of pages rather than chapters. This enables the reader to quickly find the origin of the text material; I found myself using an additional bookmark for the Notes, so that I could go from the main text to the references with ease.
Although Isaacson, of course, approaches his subject in a chronological style, the reader can differentiate among at least three major themes in the work; these are undoubtedly colored to some extent by the author’s personal positions and biases.

Einstein’s science.
Here Isaacson does an admirable job in portraying Einstein’s lifelong curiosity regarding the workings of the universe and his inclination to engage in fantasy scenarios (e.g., what would one experience if one could ride along with a beam of light? How would the sensation of being in a windowless falling elevator be interpreted?). His “thought experiments” underscored his preference for conceptualization and deductive theorization rather than theory-building by inductive use of experimental data.
This is the methodology he employed in developing his two major revolutionary formulations, Special and General Relativity. The author captures this in his description of the Einsteinian prediction that gravity acts on light just as it does on “solid” matter, and the much later observation verifying this phenomenon by measurement of the image displacement of Mercury when close to an Eclipsed sun. When asked by an interviewer about his reaction if the observation had not supported his ideas, Einstein provided the famous quip to the effect that he’d be sorry for God, because the theory was correct.
The impact of his theories, with their conceptual correlates accepting the duality of waves and particles, the equivalence of mass and energy, and the notion of a four dimensional spacetime continuum, cannot be overstated. As THE successor to Newton, he opened the door to modern physics, and that door has remained open for the last one hundred years. However, as Isaacson amply portrays, his mid and later years were characterized by his Quixotic quest for a universal field theory with which to meld the forces of gravity and electromagnetism and, correspondingly, his futile attempts to overturn the disorderly and irrational aspects of quantum mechanics with its emphasis on uncertainty and probability -- his refusal to accept the proposition that God plays dice with the universe.

Einstein’s personality and character.
Like most, my mental image of Einstein is of a kindly-looking, wildly-coiffed old man wearing a slightly befuddled expression. This probably reflects the image he displayed in his final years at the New Jersey’s Institute for Advanced Studies, but Isaacson ably paints a different portrait of his subject during his developing and most scientifically productive times.
First and foremost, he was a consistently anti authoritarian and distinctly revolutionary sort as manifested by his outspoken disdain for the educational, social, theological, political, and scientific systems of his experience. In this regard, he was often a target for criticism, ranging from mild public reproach to outright hostility especially by those who prized order, discipline, obedience, and adherence to orthodox conventionality.
Although he could be convivial and pleasant in his social contacts, particularly enjoying musical exercises with friends and scientific discussions with colleagues, he thrived on isolation in his theoretical musings (even to the extent of psychologically withdrawing during public events and spending the time scribbling equations on a notepad). This pattern was contrasted by obvious seeking public acclimation and publicity via frequent granting of interviews with media, despite the displeasure of the ‘keepers’ of his well-being.
Further, Einstein appears to have been inordinately self-centered with, evidently, an inability to demonstrate much in the way of empathy toward others, even close family members. He could be petulant, dogmatic and harshly judgmental.
He avoided emotional intimacy, but seemed to draw strong care-taking behaviors from associates, especially some of the women in his later life. Although he seems to have had a marked ethical style in most of his dealings, financially and professionally, he was inclined to act with some “moral relativity”, for example apparently being a mild womanizer with several dalliances and affairs to his credit.

Einstein’s social and philosophical positions.
As would be expected from looking at his strong resistance to authoritative control, Einstein rejected nationalism, supporting a world “supranational” government with control of the militaries of all nations. Surprisingly, in view of his experience with the Nazi regime, he was initially opposed to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine claiming that if would inevitably result in social injustice toward the non-Jewish residents; he didn’t change his perspective on this Zionist issue until after the fact of Israel’s official formation. Similarly, he espoused a creed of pacifism to the extent of encouraging civil disobedience to forced induction into the military.
He exhibited a rather strange adherence to eugenics (probably reflecting the prevailing biological viewpoints of his time), and was inclined to engage in racial/ethnic stereotypes (even Jewish ones) as well as acceptance of trait inheritance. For example, he attributed the psychiatric illness of his youngest son to the familial weaknesses of his first wife; one wonders if this view represents a psychological defense for his failure to ever have much to do with the boy.
Despite prevailing notions that Einstein was an atheist, and his non acceptance of the religious tenets of Judaism, he did exhibit a distinct theology. He rejected the idea of a personal God, but decidedly affirmed a belief in a cosmic intelligence, at least as a “prime mover”. His position seems identical to the Deistic views of other enlightenment figures including our country’s earliest intellectuals.

In conclusion, Isaacson has written an excellent study of one of the twentieth century’s true giants. The work has a Michener-like quality and style in its blend of history and character study. It was difficult to put down; for this reviewer that’s high praise for a biography.

Review by Ken West