Last week we told you that the Steve Jobs Foundation was going to publish, free of charge, a book called Make Something Beautiful, in which they told us that we were going to find an interesting selection of their documentary collection on Jobs, one of the most influential people in the history of technology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I know the naysayers will think I’m exaggerating, but a quick review of his professional career does not admit discussion. And yes, I know that it was Wozniak who created the Apple I, but it was Steve Jobs who knew how to see further, and understand that computing was going to stop being the domain of a few to become something that would reach all offices, yes , but also to all homes, to substantially change our lives. I don’t know about you, but the more I know about the Jobs story, the clearer I am that if I have to choose one word to define him, the best one is visionary.
Steve Jobs was not an easy person, something that is reflected in many works that have tried to reflect, with more or less success and success, his complicated but at the same time fascinating personality. From the interesting portrait that Martyn Burke drew in 1999 with his always recommendable “Pirates of Silicon Valley” to the biography written by Walter Isaacson and published shortly after the death of Jobs, trying to penetrate such a complex mind is a singularly complicated exercise.
For those who want to deepen their knowledge of the character and the person, the good news is that Make Something Beautiful, the book about Jobs published by the Steve Jobs Foundation, is now available for free download. For this purpose you only have to click on this link and, on the page that will open, you can choose between downloading it from Apple Books, or directly from the web in ePub format.
Unlike many other works, such as the ones I mentioned above, the interesting thing about Make Something Beautiful is that consists, almost entirely, of emails, speeches, notes, photographs and other materials from Steve Jobs himself. From the text of his speeches at Stanford to emails he sent to himself (and also some of those he sent to third parties, including employees of Apple, Pixar, etc.), to images of his harmonica collection, his CDs of Bob Dylan… even a photo of his slide rule (only those with enough gray hairs will know what that is).
Make Something Beautiful It is not a book that is read with the rhythm of a biography or a novel, because it is dedicated exclusively to collecting moments. However, this allows us to deepen our knowledge of Steve Jobs, get closer to how he lived some of the key moments of his professional life and, perhaps, understand a little better how one of the most amazing minds that the 20th century gave us worked. If you are interested in the Jobs story, as I am, I highly recommend it.
