iCon Steve Job Biography: A Quick Review

differentlee

I got an early copy of this book from B & N and quickly read it. Here are some impressions:



1. It does a very good job of covering Steve's life from the early days.

2. It is a bit short on deep analysis and has a very gossipy edge to it. I can see why Steve may have hated it.

3. Overall it's not a very fair portrait of Steve but it is kind to him in recent years.

4. It spends way too much time of the Eisner-Ovitz battle at Disney.

5. I don't think Jobs gets enough credit for the strategy work he did when he came back to Apple and it may give too much credit to Gil Amelio.

6. Not enough discussion for my tastes on recent hardware.

7. It was cool to learn some early history on Jobs and some new anecdotes of things he did.



I would give it a B- for content and recommend it to Apple fan's interested in corporate history.



I'm really curious now to read Mike Moritz' Little Kingdom which I believe is out of print.

gene clean

Oh, I see. Jobs didn't like the fact that the book was not full of praise for him, so he banned it.



Sweet!

geekdreams

Amelio's book gives Jobs all the credit.



I'm reading Gassee's book right now, in which he calls Steve "that handsome and tragic character out of some novel, that visionary monster, aesthete, lonely, detestable and fascinating creature..." And those are the compliments.



Unfortunately, Andy Hertzfeld's is the only book I've read thus far that has delved into the actual production of hardware and software, detailing (in all-too-short ancedotes) life inside the company, and explaining where some of these insanely great ideas came from.



I hope Jon Ive has a tell-all in the works for when he retires!

differentlee

I liked Hertzfeld's book as well. Bought just after I got my iMac.



Jonathan Ive would have some interesting insights for sure.