Tackling the definitive biography on the late Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc, was a daunting task given the overwhelming grief that followed his death.
This book was published after the cancer-related death of Jobs, a man revered around the world for his innovative products - technology devices which changed the world's perceptions of "cool".
Reading the news stories out of the United States, I was preparing myself for undiluted adulation of Jobs in the book. However, that was not to be the case.
Walter Isaacson does not flinch from portraying Jobs as a mean-spirited, overbearing man with a complicated and peculiar personality.
After wading halfway through the book, I returned to the first few paragraphs to make sure there was no misrepresentation of my views of the Apple "genius".
Particularly telling were the first few insights of Jobs and his relationships with his adoptive parents. The parents worked hard to provide Jobs with the tools he needed to become whatever and whomever he decided.
His adoptive father was not a clever man, in the sense that Jobs would become. Instead, his father showed the innate skills of many people of that generation - the ability to survive and provide the best he could for his family.
The scene was set when Jobs, having been bullied at a school he did not particularly like, persuaded his parents to sell up, scrape together $US20,000 and move to an area that had a school more suited to his needs.
Earlier, as Jobs and his father worked side by side on a long workbench in the garage, Jobs concluded he was much brighter then than his parents ever would be. Most children come to that conclusion at some stage in their lives. But it would seem, even at an early age, Jobs was more convinced of this than most, something I believe shaped his life at an early age.
The book was rushed to print soon after the death of Jobs on October 5 last year. It was strange reading an obituary of 630 pages, but it was worthwhile reading.
At times, one could be excused for not liking Jobs at all. At other times, his sheer genius shone through so clearly, in only a year or so people appreciate what the technology community has lost - little things like Jobs attending a plastic conference and wondering how the use of plastic would help the development of his Apple computers, or seeing a rainbow of colours and concluding that coloured Apple products were the way of the future.
Isaacson had access to the Jobs family during the writing of the book.
Jobs promised not to look over his shoulder or meddle with anything but the book's cover. And he reportedly expressed approval of the fact that the book would not be entirely flattering.
The book begins with the portrait of a young Jobs, rebellious towards the parents who raised him and scornful of the ones who gave him up for adoption.
"They were my sperm and egg bank," he says in the book.
Isaacson explores abandonment issues and concludes that one of the driving forces behind the success of Jobs, and Apple, was the need for approval in the eyes of others. It did not matter that he came from nowhere; he had arrived.
Some reviewers remain convinced the answers to the abandonment issues were never answered in the book. I believe the single-mindedness shown throughout his life, until his untimely death aged 56, was the complete answer to the question. He needed to succeed above even his own expectations to prove his worth.
Jobs founded Apple with Stephen Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976.
The book maintained the goals he achieved would not have been achievable in the "great parade" of Apple products without a mean streak.
Jobs befriended people, appeared to use them and their talents, then dumped them.
But that is only a small portion of the book. Isaacson takes the readers through the development of Apple products, reminding readers of the sceptics who wrote off each one before it became a commercial success.
The book deserves to gain wide appeal as it is a fascinating study of a man as well as a genius.
- Dene Mackenzie is the Otago Daily Times technology writer.
