Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader/ever-an-educator/lifelong learner…and also now 7th grade ELA teacher and part-time bookseller

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

My path to and through this book is quite interesting. I learned, while on a brief trip to San Diego this spring, that Steve Jobs’s birthmother was from my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And then I also learned that novelist Mona Simpson is his full sister. I had never heard either of these stories and found both quite compelling and interesting, especially given what I thought I knew about Steve Jobs.

This prompted me to read–well, mostly listen to–the lengthy (25 hours!) audiobook that shares its title with its subject–both called Steve Jobs–as well as reference the print copy sent by my cousin.

Boy, there was a LOT about Steve Jobs that I’d never heard before this. I had no idea how eccentric he most often was, how stringent his dietary practices, and/or how difficult it was to work with/for him at times. It made me think a lot about Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance, and how Jobs seems to be another, possibly who fits a bit into the “To be great is to be misunderstood camp. Emerson wrote: “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

And yet there may be many who don’t feel Jobs fits here, maybe that he’s “not that great,” merely “misunderstood.” He definitely had some interesting practices–like his fruitarian diet, or eating enough carrots that his skin turned orange. He had to have some pretty important people confront him about his own hygiene as well.

To hear (read), though, of his many ideas and innovations that reached fruition as iphones and ipods and itunes, etc. was quite impressive. And I don’t know that I was able to track all of that history as it was happening; hearing it all laid out this way, though, was very interesting.

And to learn all the details of his parents’ decision to put him up for adoption and then learn of his ultimately meeting his mother and sister in his late 20s/early 30s was all quite interesting as well.

I say read it if you’ve ever at all been a Steve Jobs fan or been skeptical about him. I feel much more in the know after this than I did before, and that’s certain. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen about Jobs’s Green Bay origins.