Book Review: Benjamin Franklin - An American Life

When I read the Steve Jobs book a while back, a friend of mine remarked that he'd preferred the book on Benjamin Franklin by the same author, Walter Isaacson. I added it to my list and then ended up doing it as an audio book, covering the bulk of it this past week while at E3, as I was staying far out and had a lot of rental car time.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, like the Steve Jobs book, is a good introductory book to Franklin. A pretty thorough work in the account of his history and accomplishments, it doesn't excessively focus on any one area.

If there's any fault to it, it's that it doesn't do too much to get into Franklin's head and discuss emotional state, relationships with those in his family (e.g. it talks about his relationship with his wife but not the emotional state of that relationship). Now granted, in order to do so, I'd imagine some poetic license would need to be taken.

Franklin was an amazing person. Like many, he was not without flaws. Still, if you've read no other work accounting his history, this is a good place to start.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Book Review: Steve Jobs

I wasn't going to read the Steve Jobs biography. I figured I knew enough of his and Apple's history that I wouldn't pick up that much new. Still, so many friends recommended it, I figured I'd give it a chance.

So much has been said about it that I feel a lengthy review isn't going to add much. Instead I'll give some high level impressions and a few interesting points and leave it at that.

The biography is interesting, but overrated. Jobs was certainly an interesting, super-driven guy with a passion for well crafted product. He was also quite an asshole (which the book does admit) as well as selfish and childish (which the book touches on but less so).

While the book mentions that he was guilty of taking credit for others' ideas, it then credits him with many of others' ideas. That said, there's something to be said for recognizing good ideas from the many placed before him, and creating an environment that pushes those ideas to be better.

In the end, the lesson is that a passion for craftsmanship, perfection, and simplicity, and placing these before profit, can yield great results. We should all strive to emulate Jobs a little in this sense.

One of the best examples, I think, of that striving for perfection is glossed over at the end of the book when discussing the plans for Apple's new campus built on HP's former campus in Cupertino. The campus is going to be a giant donut-like structure that looks like this:

Given it's massive size, one could imagine that the windows, if they were say, 8' segments, would be very close to the perfect circle. However, Jobs called for *curved* glass to be made so that it would truly be a  perfect circle. Imagine the difference in cost over that size of structure.

Steve Jobs