Reading the authorized biography of Steve Jobs you can’t help wonder at how complex a man he was.  Walter Isaacson’s impressive book seems to tell all, and a lot of the “all” isn’t very positive. Given over for adoption at birth, Jobs carried suppressed emotions throughout his life as can be attested by those who knew him well. His pursuit for perfection was often judged fanatical.  Anyone in his path got trampled, including the people who helped him make it to the top. Yet Jobs was a revolutionary and several of his projects have changed the way we live.

So good is the book that it could easily have made top fiction and I can’t help wondering what Hollywood will do with it.  Not since Orson Wells gave us his historical performance of  Citizen Kane, basing it on the life of William Randolph Hearst, has such a strong protagonist appeared, pleading for proper representation. This is no normal biography and hopefully won’t be treated as one. If Jobs had lived in an earlier era, Shakespeare would have had a field day , for Jobs was the tragic hero supreme and should be treated as such. The fact that he was adopted, haunted him throughout his life, but he was given to a loving family who did everything in their power to make him happy, a love he often abused.

The book works surprisingly on many levels, giving the reader a deep education into modern day design and marketing techniques together with the history of the home computer and music revolution. But more than anything it the story of an extreme leader who changed the world.

He was a tyrant, a dictator and a visionary all melded into one and he was a magician with words that was almost hypnotic, causing fellow workers to coordinate behavior before meetings so as to avoid getting trapped in his “reality distortion field” and forced to do his will. Jobs had his own version of reality that often included taking other peoples ideas and making them his own. Job’s life is the kind of story that masterpieces are welded from, and the Hollywood producers, looking for a quick buck, would be well advised to ignore the immediate dollar potential and strife to make a really great movie that could be aptly crowned as the successor to Citizen Kane.  I await a truly great movie. Hopefully I won’t be let down, as Jobs felt he was so many times during his life. There is a rotten Apple out there waiting to be picked.

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