Tag: Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson-Book

From a Google Image Search – CNN

In the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, the author puts Jobs in a class with Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci because Issacson also wrote about those great men. Was Steve Jobs a great man? He was certainly complicated. He loved perfection in design, but he knew that he was not perfect. Some people in Jobs’ life believed that the fact that he was adopted may have been at the bottom of some aspects of his personality. The author uses the adjectives “abandoned – chosen – special” to sum up the emotional impacts Jobs experienced as he wrestled with being given away by his actual parents. In fact, Jobs refused to meet his birth father. 

Steve had a daughter, Lisa, when he was very young, and he did not see her for years although he later tried to include her in his life. He also had a half-sister, Mona Simpson, a novelist. He did not have an easy-going personality, in fact he could be cutting and cruel, but he also had access to considerable charm. He raged at employees and suppliers, he sometimes cried when he was frustrated, and he had very bizarre eating habits (lots of fasting, mostly vegetarian or vegan). There were, however, saving graces.

He visited Japan and was very taken with the spareness and spirituality of Japanese design, and all things Japanese. He grew up with Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many more rock stars, eventually meeting most of them. He had an interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, as many famous figures did in the 1960s and 70s.

Steve Jobs is the myth. Jobs did drop out of school to tinker with computers in his parent’s garage for a while (with friends). He envisioned a future for computers, a future where everyone had a computer of his/her own. The computers he wanted to design had to have that same spareness he loved in Japanese culture, but he wanted these computers to be proprietary machines, not sharing hardware or software with Microsoft computers or any of the other companies that were racing to produce popular computers. He was fired by his own company and went off unsuccessfully on his own to create other brands but when Apple was in trouble he went back to the company, and he stayed. Although Jobs eventually agreed to allow Apple computers to use Microsoft Office, it was a tough compromise for this purist.

Find out how Jobs named Apple. Find out how Jobs got involved with Disney and Pixar. Isaacson’s book is very readable and detailed. Find out how and when he met his wife Laurene Powell and about the family they made. Jobs loved to make deals during walks with suppliers and creators who interested him. Many deals were hammered out on these long walks. The weather in California colluded with him on this. Bill Gates, with his completely different personality, showed up in Jobs’ life from time to time. They were rivals, but Gates was not as mercurial as Jobs. They didn’t collaborate much, but they were contemporaries in a field that was exploding with innovation. 

Find out how Jobs made his very seductive ads, how he imagined the iPod, iPad, iCloud, and iTunes. Jobs made each roll out of an Apple product into a ‘magical mystery tour.” He kept new products shrouded in mystery until the magical reveal. He was not only a great product designer; he was an expert at marketing. 

It’s a very good book about a very interesting person and his too short life. It is a long book but spending all that time with Jobs and his A team, his family, his temperament, and his amazingly creative mind is time well spent. Unlike Einstein and Da Vinci, Steve Jobs lived in some of the same decades we have lived in. He is not a historical figure. He is a contemporary and we forgive him his bad behavior because his creative genius inspires us to believe that even flawed humans can accomplish great things. 

Walter Isaacson is one of our quintessential biographers. He gives us the real Steve Jobs, if that is possible to do in a biography. Credit is due to Steve Jobs also for allowing Isaacson to depict him honestly.

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson – Book

Leonardo horiz big the Malta Independent

If your eyes and heart were opened to a whole new world filled with oil paints, and tempura, gouache, symbolism, and the subject matter of artists you were probably in your first art history class. It was a revelation that you could watch slides and listen to a professor speak about them and come away with a head full of images that lit up your mind, slapped a smile on your face and made you long for the great museums of NYC and Paris.

This is the place that Walter Isaacson takes you to in his book Leonardo Da Vinci. He puts us back in that art history class as he walks us through the details of Da Vinci’s paintings. There are color plates (even on a Kindle).

However, Leonardo was not first and foremost a painter, although that is certainly one way we remember him. After all, he did paint the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Leonardo, it seems, was not in love with painting and left many works unfinished. His mind saw all the components of the physical world that needed to be comprehended at great depth in order to make someone a great artist. He spent years dissecting cadavers and made exquisitely detailed anatomy drawings. He wanted to see inside eyes, brains, hearts and he drew very sophisticated conclusions about how bodies work. He studied rocks, birds (to learn about flight) and, in excruciating detail, the movements of water. He studied optics and perspective.

Yes, all of these things relate to art, but they relate even more to physics and engineering. I will leave it to Isaacson to tell you some of the other unique things Da Vinci wanted to know. Leonardo also loved theatrics and building machines for special dramatic effects. In this way he entertained kings and rulers and participated socially in the entertainments of the times, while always searching for a patron to help support his activities, his household, and the students who came to work in his workshop. He was not wealthy, being the illegitimate son of a notary.

Sadly for us, Leonardo was so often enticed by ever newer areas of exploration that he never published his enormous treasure trove of notebooks and he left it to others to receive credit for his discoveries. Perhaps it was because he was left handed and all his notations were made in mirror writing (he wrote from right to left). The idea of ancient aliens who came to earth when men were still quite primitive is now the subject of the Ancient Aliens television series, but I remember running across it years ago. Several times as I read about Da Vinci I thought he might be a distant offspring of such a technologically advanced alien visitor. Walter Isaacson is a true academic though and he said no such thing. He does not deal in conjecture and gives attributions for almost every point he makes in a fairly extensive set of footnotes at the end to the text. There is also a useful index to take you back to sections you want to review.

Isaacson is both a biographer and an art critic, as well as a fan of Leonardo and his book is not at all difficult to read. He doesn’t get bogged down in academia and he clearly wants us to share his admiration for Leonardo Da Vinci. It is a book to read in quiet moments with a nice cup of something warm or on a park bench with your bottled water while taking a break in your daily walk. A chance to dawdle in the 14th and 15th century as Leonardo pursues his life and his art, while wandering Italian towns in his rose colored robes, is the gift that Walter Isaacson gives us.