Steve Jobs

This book did a great job at painting Steve Jobs in a refreshingly human way; brilliant, innovative, narcissistic, imprudent. It also traversed the golden age of technological innovation in the computer industry in a way that filled me with wonder (causing me to look at the digital landscape of 2020 and yawn in response), and left me semi-nostalgic for those childhood years when new inventions were happening and products were painstakingly curated. From a product perspective Jobs is a true inspiration - a staunch believer in absolute simplicity and human-centric design - heavily influenced from those impressionable meets with the Bauhaus school of design. His philosophy of highly controlled hardware and software unity is delicately outlined and counter-balanced with the (kind of) open-source approach from Microsoft et al, which also took the book into the territory of his many business adversaries. His saving and reinvigorating of Pixar was another pleasant history lesson (a company he often isn't associated with) which was a nice break from the corporate backdrop of the biography.