The Steve Jobs biography.

Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is out Monday.

All week long, excerpts have been leaking out, with little snippets of the late Apple CEO's reported thoughts on alternative medicine, Android, Bill Gates, being strategically mean to people, Obama, what apps Obama's staffers had on their iPads, cancer, teachers' unions and labor rights, Issey Miyake turtlenecks, the adoptive parents he loved and rebelled against, and the biological parents who gave him up for adoption (whom he is said to have referred to as "sperm and egg donors").

The first real review, by Janet Maslin in the New York Times, is out today.

You can read all 630 pages of the book for yourself soon. [Amazon].

• [Lexicat]

  What is up with the “being strategically mean” link? It get special broken link sauce when i clickit.

  • [jimh]

    Yeah broken link- I would like to see that one also!

• [pizzicato]

  Anything about his belly too much swelling with jack fruit? Nope? Nothing insightful from my point of view, he hit the off switch that it, move on everyone there’s nothing to watch here.

  • [flosofl]

    Well, I guess that’s that, then. If you, pizzicato, can’t find anything insightful in this how can the rest of us?  Well, there go the book sales.

    apropos of nothing, I kept wanting to spell your handle as pizzataco.

• [autark]

  definitely part of the 1%… oh if only we disband the teacher’s unions and model our factories after China – this is not genius.

  • [monopole]

    From a college dropout who never spent a day in a factory.

• [monopole]

  “Our lawsuit is saying, ‘Apple, you f—ing ripped off PARC, wholesale ripped us off,’” Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Xerox ‘s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Macintosh, because it’s a stolen product.”

  There I fixed it for you…

  Zero capacity or empathy or intropsection, and a severe Irony deficiency.

  A literal textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder straight out of DSM-IV:

  -An exaggerated sense of one’s own abilities and achievements.

  -A constant need for attention, affirmation and praise.

  -A belief that he or she is unique or “special” and should only associate with other people of the same status.

  -Persistent fantasies about attaining success and power.

  -Exploiting other people for personal gain.

  -A sense of entitlement and expectation of special treatment.

  -A preoccupation with power or success.

  -Feeling envious of others, or believing that others are envious of him or her.

  -A lack of empathy for others.

  • [xian]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#Adoption_by_Apple

    • [bibulb]

      Thanks, that sums it up a hell of a lot better than I was about to attempt.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  From the snippets that I’ve seen, it appears that his biological parents were Howard Hughes and Evita Peron.

• [AMJ]

  I think i’ll steal this book.

• [marukosu]

  I lost some respect for Jobs when I read that he fatally delayed treatment for his illness by seeking ‘alternative’ options first. What a waste.

  • [awjt]

    It’s not like Western medicine has it in-the-bag, but this alternative shit is 10x worse.

• [proc_kcore]

  Again with this photo of Steve. I find it sad that most people making tributes to him just printed this picture off apple.com and used it for their tributes. And I thought Apple users were supposed to be creative-types?

  Oh wait, it’s the 21st century Apple. Their way is the best way, hold the phone this way, and just do what we tell you to do, sheep…

  • [penguinchris]

    Well, apparently it was by far Jobs’ favorite photo of himself. Knowing that, it seems fitting to use that photo for generic tributes.

    Beyond that, though, I wasn’t looking for them at all but saw probably dozens of other photos of Jobs that were circulating after his death – many very good photos that I (and most people, presumably) hadn’t seen, from the 70′s up to recent years.

• [Sofia Ortiz]

  As to the last note about Jobs, adoptees (and, on occasion, birth parents) do often call their genetic (or, more PC, birth) parents simply “sperm” or “egg donors”. This is supposed to reflect the minimal role that adoptees / (usually also birth mothers) believe that the genetic parents had in raising the child, or how much/little they believe a genetic/birth parent deserves the “parent” label.

  There is much arguing about this within the adoptive/adoptee community, of course, but I’m just putting it out there that it’s not like Jobs is the only one.

• [Jeremy Wilson]

  How appropriate that the Kindle edition is more expensive than both the hardcover and audio version – $20.  Steve’s legacy lives on.

• [Brian Whittle]

  Steve Jobs may have been the Moist von Lipwig of his generation
  but Bill Gates is the better man