Second Coming of Steve Jobs
- Book Review,
by Alan Deutschman
Amazon.com
For the legions who revere Apple Computer's high-profile cofounder as a godlike figure, the aptly titled Second Coming of Steve Jobs will prove an intriguing picture of a seminal time in their deity's roller-coaster life. It should emphatically vindicate their deeply held faith in the man and his ideas. But even for those with a lesser opinion, Alan Deutschman offers an interesting and enlightening look at the crucial period from Jobs's unceremonious Apple exit through his triumphant return. Deutschman, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine and longtime Silicon Valley correspondent, interviewed nearly 100 colleagues and friends to draw this portrait of a bewilderingly complex and notoriously private man--albeit one whose talents, personality traits, and idiosyncrasies have long been on public display. "He succeeded in becoming the Jackie Kennedy Onassis of business and technology," Deutschman writes, "a figure who was ubiquitous as a symbol of his times but little known as a human being." To change that, he looks into Jobs's ill-fated first post-Apple endeavor at the Next computer company, his return to undeniable respectability with Pixar and the two Toy Story movies, and finally, his ultimate absolution with a very successful reclamation of the Apple crown. It's a revealing account of a singular individual during a remarkable time. --Howard Rothman
From Publishers Weekly
A revealing, balanced portrait of Apple Computers CEO and founder Steven Jobs, this fast-paced business biography is based on interviews with nearly 100 of his associates and friends. One glaring absence, however, is Jobs himself, who apparently declined to be interviewed by Deutschman, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and staff writer at GQ. Still, Deutschman provides a juicy, privileged look inside the Apple core. He reports that Jobs's recent resuscitation of Apple, to which the visionary entrepreneur returned in 1996 after being ousted by John Sculley a decade earlier, was accomplished through a "reign of terror" that shook up thousands of complacent employees. Like other commentators, Deutschman portrays Jobs as both engaging and troubling, a natural charmer who is also an abusive, egomaniacal boss fond of meting out public humiliations. But Deutschman goes further, replacing the image of the pop-culture icon with a complex, contradictory figureAan insecure elitist who yearns for the patronage of the masses, a narcissistic vegetarian billionaire who thrives on scarcity and adversity. Among the book's revelations are details of Jobs's bulimia-like eating disorders in the 1970s; his reconnection in the '80s with his long-lost biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson (Jobs was given up for adoption at birth); and his explosive negotiations with Disney honchos Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who produced the hits A Bug's Life and Toy Story with Pixar, Jobs's animation film studio. Though this gossipy bio has a slick magazine feel, Deutschman gets closer to Jobs's inner self than any previous attempt. Agent, Suzanne Gluck, ICM. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The story of Steve Jobs is a complex one, with dramatic reversals of fortune and rebounds from apparent defeat to the height of success. Deutschman, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Fortune magazine's Silicon Valley correspondent for seven years, has interviewed nearly 100 people, including Jobs's close friends, colleagues, and rivals. The work focuses on Jobs's life and career, from his 1985 exile from Apple Computers (the company he cofounded), through his return to the struggling company 12 years later as acting CEO, to his recent appointment as Apple's chief executive. During his second tenure at Apple, the company experienced a dramatic turnaround, with high profits and the tripling of stock prices. Along the way, Jobs achieved success with his animation studio, Pixar, culminating in the 1995 release of Toy Story. Jobs's personal life and relationships with family and friends are also related. This fascinating study of Jobs and of the inner workings of Pixar and Apple Computers is an important addition to both public and academic libraries.-.DLucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The Industry Standard
Even the dot-com hype has failed to produce a CEO with the rock-star status of Steve Jobs. Maybe that's not surprising. There really is something elusively compelling about Jobs. He's figured prominently in at least five nonfiction books. A major literary novel is widely assumed to be based on his life. And he was the subject, along with Bill Gates, of a TV miniseries. It's enough to make one wonder at the amount of attention paid to the head of Apple Computer which is, when you get down to it, not a particularly important tech company.Now along comes Alan Deutschman, a Silicon Valley journalist and Vanity Fair contributing editor, with The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, a book that even prior to publication has succeeded on at least one front: It apparently annoyed its subject a great deal. Jobs reportedly complained to the head of Random House (Broadway Books is one of its imprints) that Deutschman had written a "hatchet job." Vanity Fair canceled plans - apparently rather late in the production cycle - to excerpt the book in its October issue, citing space concerns. Deutschman told the New York Times that, although he has no evidence of it, he believes Jobs pressured the magazine to cancel the story. Naturally the net effect of all this will be to focus more attention on Deutschman's book.The Second Coming gets under way with Deutschman's observation that the arc to the Jobs story is now something right out of a three-act Hollywood screenplay. We have the rise of the precocious co-founder of Apple, his brutal comeuppance running the ill-fated NeXT, and his unlikely redemption as head of Pixar and a miraculously resuscitated Apple. Jobs is a helpful protagonist, by turns charming and cruel, possessed of a towering ego and, maybe most important, a gift for transcendent rhetoric.Recently he was in the news touting Apple's newest machine and its iMovie software. Is iMovie good? Is iMovie insanely great? No. IMovie, Jobs declares, "is profound." The software, he says, will "help iMac customers have an emotional experience."What is Jobs up to when he says things like that? Does he really mean it? Or is it all done for effect? Jobs himself was apparently not willing to take up this or any other question with Deutschman, who instead has based his book on "scores" of interviews with people around Jobs. It's difficult to evaluate these sources, as Deutschman tells us that many insisted on anonymity, and a high number of the attributed quotes in the book come from other journalists or from PR people.Even so, the raw material of Jobs' life is undeniably interesting, and if you don't know the basic plot points very well, Deutschman's book is a good primer. Jobs rises from the working-class milieu of the family that adopted him, drops out of college and at a fantastically young age co-founds Apple. From the beginning, apparently, he is possessed of irresistible charisma and self-confidence.There's a pleasant dishiness to this particular retelling. Deutschman dutifully notes that Jobs was "the first businessman as rock star," adding that Jobs would have been Time's Man of the Year if not for his messy personal life, including a daughter born out of wedlock whom he was reluctant to support. (Time's honor went to "the computer" instead.) The author also gives us a peek at Jobs' romantic dalliances with, among others, singer Joan Baez and artist Maya Lin. And he recounts Jobs' reunion with his biological sister, writer Mona Simpson, as well as the subsequent apparent rupture when her novel A Regular Guy seemed to be patterned on Jobs' life.All this is fun, and probably the source of Jobs' distress over the book, but there isn't much depth to it. Various scenes that turn on Jobs humiliating this or that bit player - playing a mean prank on a small-time computer consultant, telling an unnamed minion that "you've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting" - end up going nowhere. Jobs is referred to as "Steve" throughout the book, and we also meet "Bill" (Gates), "Ross" (Perot), "Scott" (McNealy) and "Ann" (Winblad). This seems meant to imply a familiarity with the subject, but it sounds superficial.Perhaps it's telling that the book's preface doesn't lay out any particular set of ideas about Jobs that will carry through the ensuing three-act drama. Instead it's a patch-together of scenes and sentences that appear later in the book - which only makes Deutschman's habit of repetition worse. On page 2 we learn that "NeXT was bleeding money, hemorrhaging money"; on page 48 we find that "NeXT was burning through money, bleeding money, hemorrhaging money"; on page 55 it turns out that "the company was bleeding money" and as for Pixar, well, you'll not be surprised to learn on page 121 that it, too, "was bleeding money."More annoying than repetition is inconsistent repetition: In the preface, "a newspaper reporter" asks Jobs whether layoffs at NeXT mean the company is a failure. "'I don't want to do this interview,' he said softly. He got up and walked away." When the same anecdote crops up again in the book's third chapter, the reporter now works for "a weekly trade magazine"; Jobs delivers the same line, and stands up to go, but this time he doesn't. ("He returned and sat for an interview.")Nit-picking aside, what does this collection of entertaining anecdotes add up to? In the end, it's hard to tell what Deutschman thinks of his subject. At NeXT, Jobs seems like little more than a spoiled, bullying tyrant who is in way over his head. At Pixar, he is a mere figurehead, most notable for being easily ignored. Yet the book seems willing to give Jobs almost complete credit for the resurgence of Apple, explaining that he cracked down on an undisciplined workforce and conjured up marketing magic.The book offers an unhelpful good Steve-bad Steve dichotomy and concludes with a string of 10 "opinions and theories" about Jobs and why people might still want to read a book about him ("he's a great enigma") culled from Silicon Valley onlookers. In a final act of desperation, Deutschman quotes his boss: "Steve had what Vanity Fair's editor Graydon Carter liked to call the 'X factor,' a charisma and buzz and fascination that was an invaluable asset for a mogul." Ah, yes - the "X factor."Almost perfectly empty observations like that are what make The Second Coming of Steve Jobs feel like the sort of quickie bios that get written about rock stars, based largely on the recollections of hangers-on. It's less an explanation of our obsession with Steve Jobs than it is evidence that the obsession persists.In his 1993 book Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, Randall Stross concludes that the legendary Apple founder was something of a construct: "The human eye has trouble focusing on the group; it prefers the heroic individual." So if we have to think about Jobs as a rock star, maybe the place to start is with Bob Dylan circa Don't Look Back - a young man who was celebrated not just as a star, but as something of a prophet. Certainly Dylan was very talented, but he was also, like Jobs, of the right place and time to stand as a symbol of something larger. For Jobs, the problem during the period Stross focuses on was that he had come to believe this construct himself. The result was some $250 million hurled down a black hole.The idea that the public Jobs was at least as much a reflection of his times as a shaper of them is a compelling one - although it does not satisfactorily explain his rise from the ashes of NeXT and his return to the cover of business magazines. Perhaps what Jobs learned in the interim is that success is never inevitable, even for American heroes, and that a CEO is ultimately better off believing in his products' profundity rather than his own.Rob Walker is a contributing writer to Money and Slate.
Review
"Great Read. One of the keenest observers of the business and culture of Silicon Valley sets his sights on one of the most remarkable stories in the recent history of Silicon Valley."
--Fast Company
"A carefully sketched portrait of a paradoxical man…reads like a novel and has the scope of Ben Hur. And it’s the strangest of high-tech industry books it’s good."
--Business 2.0
"Deutschman illuminates the attributes that have made Jobs not only a success but also an influential innovator in two major industries. THE SECOND COMING…includes fascinating details about Jobs…anyone interested in the culture of Silicon Valley should find it well worth a read."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Deutschman, in a mere 301 pages, rips a hole in Jobs that can only be compared to the fatal tear in the Hindenburg."
--Forbes.com
"A fascinating portrait of the Apple Computer founder…A mesmerizing, outstanding read, this book crackles with energy. Some of the passages will make your mouth drop open."
--Dallas Morning News
"Alan Deutschman’s delicious Steve Jobs biography is a psychological profile with a fruit-flavored iMac punch line. The book is a pleasure to read, but not surprisingly, Jobs wishes you wouldn’t."
--Chicago Sun Times
Review
"Great Read. One of the keenest observers of the business and culture of Silicon Valley sets his sights on one of the most remarkable stories in the recent history of Silicon Valley."
--Fast Company
"A carefully sketched portrait of a paradoxical man?reads like a novel and has the scope of Ben Hur. And it?s the strangest of high-tech industry books it?s good."
--Business 2.0
"Deutschman illuminates the attributes that have made Jobs not only a success but also an influential innovator in two major industries. THE SECOND COMING?includes fascinating details about Jobs?anyone interested in the culture of Silicon Valley should find it well worth a read."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Deutschman, in a mere 301 pages, rips a hole in Jobs that can only be compared to the fatal tear in the Hindenburg."
--Forbes.com
"A fascinating portrait of the Apple Computer founder?A mesmerizing, outstanding read, this book crackles with energy. Some of the passages will make your mouth drop open."
--Dallas Morning News
"Alan Deutschman?s delicious Steve Jobs biography is a psychological profile with a fruit-flavored iMac punch line. The book is a pleasure to read, but not surprisingly, Jobs wishes you wouldn?t."
--Chicago Sun Times
Book Description
From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist–an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. With a new epilogue on Apple’s future survival in today’s roller-coaster economy, here is the revealing biography that blew away the critics and stirred controversy within industry and media circles around the country.
Download Description
From acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist Alan Deutschman comes the fascinating story of the man who founded Apple Computers, NeXT, and Pixar, and who has become one of the most powerful figures in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
Book Info
(Random House, Inc.) A portrait of successful businessman, Steve Jobs, beginning in 1985 with his exile from Apple, to the rise and fall of Steve's own company NeXT, to his triumphant return to Apple in the 1990's. DLC: Apple Computer, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist–an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. With a new epilogue on Apple’s future survival in today’s roller-coaster economy, here is the revealing biography that blew away the critics and stirred controversy within industry and media circles around the country.
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