Connecting the dots  

The book under review is a well researched account of one of the greatest visionaries to have ever walked this earth and it does adequate justice to its subject. An OER review

Karen Blumenthal is a critically acclaimed children’s non-fiction writer and a long-time journalist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition, which received four starred reviews, Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929, which was a Sibert Honor Book, and Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, which won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. Though Issac Walterson’s authorised biography of Steve Jobs has been getting most of the attention, Blumenthal’s Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different is an equally incisive and perceptible account of this legendary figure.

Down memory lane
From the start, Steve’s path was unpredictable. He was given up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college after one semester, and at the age of twenty, created Apple in his parents’ garage with his friend Steve Wozniack. Then came the core and hallmark of his genius--his exacting moderation for perfection, his counterculture life approach, and his level of taste and style that pushed all boundaries. A devoted husband, father, and Buddhist, he battled cancer for over a decade, became the ultimate CEO and made the world want every product he touched.

Blumenthal takes us to the core of this complicated and legendary man while simultaneously exploring the evolution of computers. Framed by Jobs’ inspirational Stanford commencement speech and illustrated throughout with black and white photos, this is the story of the man who changed our world. Blumenthal weaves her portrait on the thematic frame used by Jobs himself in his autobiographical 2005 Stanford commencement address. She ‘connects the dots’ that led him from his adoption as an infant through his ‘phone phreaking’ days to a spectacular rise and just as meteoric fall from corporate grace in the 1980s.

Following a decade of diminished fortunes and largely self-inflicted complications in personal relationships, he returned to Apple for a spectacular second act that also turned out to be his final one. Despite getting bogged down occasionally in detail, the author tells a cohesive tale, infused with dry wit (‘He also considered going into politics, but he had never actually voted, which would have been a drawback’). The book takes one through the roller coaster ride life of Steve Jobs, the genius, maverick, rebel and visionary. The book is thoroughly researched and clear on the subject’s foibles as well as his genius. A perceptive, well-wrought picture of an iconic figure well worth admiring – from a distance. 
 

Top^