A bad book…iCon.

January 29th, 2006 | Filed under Reviews

I’m not really one to spend my time tearing things down as I subscribe to the Tug and John, over at American Copywriter, theory that it is always easier to tear something down than it is to create. It is for that reason, and you might have noticed, that I don’t tend to review things I do not enjoy. What is the point of waisting my time writing, and your time reading, about things that aren’t very good.

However, I feel like I need to toss up a quick post about my lastest reading conquest, iCon: Steve Jobs the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, by Young and Simon. I had seen the fuss online about the book when it had originally come out, but I didn’t really see the need to spend 20 bucks on a book, that while I’d probably find a few things interesting, I don’t really need.

Enter last week. The girlfriend saw it on the “new books” section at the public library and I couldn’t resist the urge to check it out for free. I immediately sat down and started pouring through it. I was more than excited to read about the original creation of Apple Computers, as well as Pixar and NeXT, and Steve’s return to Apple in the late 90s.

The book however, didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, and it felt like it had an agenda of just being mean. Everyone knows that the Apple and Pixar CEO (actually Pixar was just purchased by Disney which means Disney might not suck anymore), Steve Jobs, is an interesting guy with a short temper and an weird style of motivation…but the authors assume so many things as the reason for that in the book that it just started to piss me off. Instead of hypothesizing events in his person life as the reason for actions they flat out state them as facts, making the reader spend the entire process of reading the book trying to decipher who is telling the truth.

If you really want a good read about Steve Jobs and the creation of Apple, Pixar, and the Mac check out The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Deutschman (whom the book I’m reviewing quotes from), Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the software engineers on the original Macintosh team or even ex-apple CEO Gil Amelio’s book, On the Firing Line. All three of these books are excellent reads and completely fill in the gaps of left open in iCon.

The only thing iCon has going for it, is that it does deal with content after the publishing of Deutschman’s book such as the introduction and success of the iPod and OSX. However, these are not reason to justify the rest of the book. If you really want to learn more about those things check out the rest of the blogosphere and I guarantee you’ll find it. In the end I was definitely not impressed with this book. Sorry for the negativity but I wanted to be honest.