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If you'd simply had a subscription to Byte Magazine and casually read every third article you'd know at least 50% of what he put in that book. We're talking ab
by astrodust 9y ago
If you'd simply had a subscription to Byte Magazine and casually read every third article you'd know at least 50% of what he put in that book.
We're talking about someone who over decades had an outsized impact on Silicon Valley and computing in general, not some obscure figure that nobody ever wrote about and you'd have to go out of your way to learn more. If this was about Gordon Moore or Andy Grove you'd have a point, but it's Steve fucking Jobs. There's maybe ten people from his era that are more instantly recognizable, and those are people like Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton.
Isaacson's book is the Reader's Digest version of a biography. It's the WikiHow version of what should have been written.
Imagine writing a biography of Elon Musk and introducing, breathlessly, that he made his first fortune from PayPal as if people didn't know. This is that book.
- bborud 9y agoMany people don’t know. That’s the entire point. Not everyone is a stalker fanboi who absorbs all trivia over years and needs a pure diet of only previously untold anecdotes.
- astrodust 9y agoIt's not that I'm a "stalker fanboi" so much as you've apparently been living under a rock for the last thirty years if you haven't heard this shit before. Did you know Bill Gates founded Microsoft? No way! Did you know Steve Wozniak built the original Apple? Get out! This is not mind-blowing news. It's also irrelevant. This ended up being some bullshit compendium when, given the unprecedented access, you'd expect better. They could've written this book based on anecdotes and old press. That's the problem.
- bborud 9y agoIf you made a point of getting to know people outside your sphere, you would be surprised at how little some people know about these things. That you take this for granted says more about you than Isaacson’s book on Jobs. For instance: I don’t follow football. Which means that you can pick any football celebrity in the world ever and at most — at the very most, I may be able to connect a name to the face. But I wouldn’t know what they’ve done or who they’ve played for. In the unlikely event that I would read their biography, it would be helpful to provide ample context. Now the thing is that do the comments here help me determine if the book he wrote on da Vinci is accurate? No. Not really. Not any more than random newspaper reviewer opining on the quality of the writing.