Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson

When Steve Jobs died earlier this year. I really felt the loss in terms of the amazing products he had been a part of producing at Apple. I was also aware of his time at Pixar which produced movies that I have enjoyed since my Dad took my brother and I to see Toy Story.

iPods, iPhones, iPads and iTunes have changed the way that we do many things. I am constantly thankful to the technology that makes it possible for me to photograph my children and email them to my Mum in Queensland 5 seconds later. I use FaceTime to share moments with family such as Taj’s first bath with his big brother or Jayden reading Green Eggs and Ham in bed.

I’m not saying that these products were Jobs’ innovations alone but he had a clarity of design, amazing marketing skills and an intuitive knowledge of a product that we can’t live without that last week we never knew we needed.

This book was a great insight into what made Jobs’ tick. It wasn’t particularly well written and was in need of some editing but the detailed look at the people in Jobs’ worlds at both Apple and Pixar was just so interesting.

Everyone new that Jobs’ and Wazniak started Apple in a garage in the Silicone Valley but there were so many incredible feats of ingenuity in their rise to the top that it takes your breath away.

I felt the author let a few things slide that would have been very interesting to know about. For example much of the book detailed Apple’s “end to end” concepts – producing the iPod, iTunes store to work together and the fact that most of his late products are “closed” you can’t even change a battery, and no other developers can change your hardware etc. considering how often this was mentioned I was looking forward to hearing Jobs’ opinion on “jailbreaking” and “firmware” where Hackers open the closed software making it possible to put illegally downloaded content onto an iPod or iPhone for free. It is also possible to costomise icons, and access content that iTunes does not allow. Based on Jobs’ desire to control every aspect of the customer experience and also based on Apple’s hacker heritage I thought this was a big topic to leave untouched.

The chapters centre around different themes, mostly chronologically. I think that the editing may have been missing is some cases where a point has been covered earlier and is then echoed later on in the book, perhaps some people like the reminder … To me it makes a book feel clunky.

The best part about this biography is that although much of it is based on interviews with Steve himself, the biographer doesn’t fail to show the flip side of an argument and the way that Steve has a terrible way with people. In fact his wife apparently asked Isaacson to ensure that Steve was shown as true to life as possible. He was not a very nice person by most accounts. Tyrannical and pigheaded. He was a vegan and had strong opinions on his Zen lifestyle. It is amazing to read about his reaction to his cancer diagnosis and his dogmatic desire to pretend it would go away.

If you own an Apple product then this book is well worth a read. It will give you a much better appreciation of the minimalist design and the teasoning behind them that you have taken for granted.

Blindness by José Saramago

I have been intending to write a review on this book for a few weeks now and I keep getting caught up in life and forgetting. Yesterday when I pulled up at the local supermarket I was transported back to Blindness. “The Doctor’s Wife”, the only sighted person in a sea of blind, hunting for food. It is for me the strongest visual from Blindness and such a sign of a great novel.

The first thing I love about Blindness is how much you care about the characters although you do not know a whole lot about them. They are not given names. “The Doctor” “The Girl with the Dark Glasses” etc, are only ever referred to as such.

Sitting at the traffic lights, a man is waiting for the lights to change. He looks up. He sees a bright white light and cries “I am blind”. He is “The First Blind Man” A passer-by on the street offers to take the man’s car and drive him home. He drops off “The First Blind Man” at his house to await the return of his wife. We stay with him, but later we find out the man who dropped him home stole his car… and soon after turned blind himself.

“The Wife of the First Blind Man” takes her husband to “The Doctor” he is perplexed and recommends more tests, before the night is out he has turned blind and so have the patients waiting in the waiting room along with “The First Blind Man”

This epidemic of white blindness spreads and the powers that be decide to put those who are blind along with anyone who has been in contact with them into a closed mental facility to be controlled by a branch of the army. They are separated into The Blind and The Contaminated.

I am fascinated by this post-apocalyptic style of novel. This situation of mass blindness asks a lot of humanity. When the food stops coming regularly and one ward of the facility decide to control the food in return for sex from the females of each ward, I am sickened but not surprised. This return to primal desires is brought up often in post-apocolytic novels. In King’s The Stand, a motorcycle gang block a road and capture those woman who try to cross. A blind man in The Day of the Triffids, captures a sighted woman and uses her as his sighted slave.

Would I, as a woman, be prepared to offer myself to these men in return for food for my husband? Would men who were not felons or mental patients in their normal life, turn into sexual devients because of the leadership of one inherently bad man? If I were blind, with no indication of sight returning would I even have the will to continue to live in conditions such as these? For some reason these questions fascinate me and Jose Saramago does not disappoint. The characters do not have huge amounts of back story, but you are with them every step of the way on their struggle.

Let it be noted that I read this as an audiobook – Wikipedia says “Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers’ identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader.”  The audiobook however was wonderfully narrated by Jonathan Davis and never felt like a translation. This book was originally publishes in Portuguese and there has also been a movie adaptation which, kids permitting, I will sit down and watch tonight and share my thoughts with you later.

If anyone is out there I’d really love some suggestions of similarly themed books to read. Earth Abides, The Stand, Day of the Triffids, The Road, Children of the Dust…  I’d also love to know of any outstanding audiobooks. Jonathan Davis narrated The Earth Abides also and I thought that was fantastic. A good narrator really does make all the difference.

Until next time …

 

Postscript; Well I did get to watch the movie adaption of Blindness. I watched it in 2 or 3 sittings which is the only way I ever get to watch movies and it wasn’t bad….

I am not usually a fan of Julianne Moore but she was good as the “Doctor’s wife”.  As is usual with most movie adaptations there were important segments missed and it was definitely not as good as the book but considering that all but one of the cast have to play a blind person I think it was terrifically well acted and scripted.

Give it a go if you like the novel but don’t watch it instead of reading the novel!