Less truly revelatory and more just a difference in tone and spirit than previous accounts.
A reframing of the biographical narrative of the late Apple visionary, from the perspectives of business journalists Schlender and Tetzeli and the associates of Jobs’ they interviewed.
Written by two colleagues, one of whom had been close to Jobs as both a subject and friend for a quarter-century, this biography is intended to serve as a corrective to what they see as an overly simplified stereotype, one that they consider perpetuated by Jobs’ anointed official biographer, Walter Isaacson: that “Steve was a genius with a flair for design” but “a pompous jerk who disregarded everyone in his pursuit of perfection.” The “I” in the narrative reflects the long relationship Schlender had with Jobs, one through which “none of this gibed with my experience of Steve, who always seemed more complex, more human, more sentimental, and even more intelligent than the man I read about elsewhere.” Too much of the legend, they write, focuses on the early years and rise of Apple, which fired the man who had founded it because of clashes of vision (and his difficulty with people), and then on his triumphant return to lead Apple to even greater glories with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and other paradigm-shifting innovations. What’s missing, write the authors, is the transformation in the middle, the “wilderness years,” when Jobs learned so much from what went wrong between him and Apple. Schlender and Tetzeli draw from many Apple colleagues, present and past, who say they wouldn’t have continued to work with a guy who was as big a jerk as Jobs was often portrayed. Yet even this biography depicts a man who could be insensitive, disloyal, and delusional, and the authors’ business perspective goes lighter on the personal and family details that might have humanized their subject more, while reinforcing the perspective that Jobs could have blinders on when it came to work.
Less truly revelatory and more just a difference in tone and spirit than previous accounts.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-34740-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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