GoKawiilThis week marked the release of ‘Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary,’ by author Geoffrey Cain, a deliciously thorough book that dives deep into the years that most people overlook when retelling the Apple co-founder’s famous redemption story.
‘Steve Jobs in Exile’ adds interesting layers to what you think you knew about Steve Jobs
There is a scene in Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma,’ where Rufus, the forgotten 13th apostle played by Chris Rock, notes:
In the Bible, Jesus goes from twelve to thirty. That’s some pretty bad storytelling.
And while Steve Jobs was no Jesus Christ by any stretch, I kept coming back to this notion of lost memory as I devoured Geoffrey Cain’s new book, Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary.
As Cain notes in the book’s acknowledgments, Steve Jobs in Exile is the fruit of years of research, greatly expanded by interviews with “111 individuals who gave their time,” and shared their lived experiences before, during, and after Steve Jobs’ wilderness years.
That includes NeXT cofounders such as Dan’l Lewin, Susan Barnes, Rich Page, George Crow, and Bud Tribble, Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, NeXT alumni turned (former) Apple executives Jon Rubinstein and Bertrand Serlet, photographer Doug Menuez, and former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée, to name a few.
Split into three parts containing 28 chapters and an epilogue, plus a foreword by Lewin and an afterword by Catmull, the book tackles the challenging task of telling a story that most people know how it ends, presenting new information taken directly from personal archives, and from the memories of the key people who were in the room for discussions and events that otherwise would have been completely lost to time.
Steve Jobs in Exile also treads the line of presenting just the right amount of technical details as to not overwhelm less technically-inclined readers who might be interested in Jobs’s “lost years,” but never underestimating the reader.
From the relevance and the technical aspects of WebObjects, to the minutiae of bookkeeping and stock compensation, the book never treats the reader as if the hard parts need to be dumbed down or glossed over. Cain even cooks up an analogy for object-oriented programming that I’ll absolutely be using from now on.
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