Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody

Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody
by Fake Steve Jobs

Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody
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Book Summary Information

Author: Fake Steve Jobs
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-18
ISBN: 0306815842
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Da Capo Press

Book Reviews of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody

Book Review: El Jobso couldn't have designed this book, because it's not perfect
Summary: 3 Stars

For starters, this book has some packaging problems. You'd never know from the wrapper that it was meant to be a novel, rather than (as you might expect, based on the blog) a collection of short essay-like zingers about the tech industry. And while the jacket designer picked the right font (Myriad) the book as a whole suggests not The Steve's aesthetic perfectionism but a cynical make-it-shiny-it'll-sell approach. For goodness' sake, the glue used in this book's binding *smells* terrible. Neither Fake nor Real Steve should have permitted that kind of sloppiness to be attached to his name.

Moving on to substance: this book doesn't have much. The plot, such as it is, is driven by El Jobso's "persecution" by the SEC for options backdating, which causes him to think about dropping out of the industry. This topic is less than gripping, even for Apple cultists. It's dressed up with some enjoyable boardroom backstabbing and we see Steve fire and betray numerous colleagues in amusingly derisory fashion. But the long-form plot you might want from a novel is mostly missing, as the book is written in episodic little nuggets whose connections are sometimes unmotivated. And the Fake Steve character doesn't really develop, beyond the shallowest of eventual revelations (he doesn't really believe he invented the iPod; he worries but then eventually just accepts that he's sociopathically selfish). Meanwhile the novel's other characters are an awkward mix of real names (Jobs loves to get stoned with Larry Ellison, and Hillary Clinton turns out to be kind of mean, ha ha) with fictional and/or fictionalized ones (most of the other Apple staff we meet, the designers and engineers and board members, are composites). You get the feeling some real publishing lawyer told Fake Steve to tone it down at risk of a libel suit, and as a result we're left with a roman a clef whose key doesn't unlock much of interest. Even people who attend WWDC and have read Sculley's autobiography (why would you do that to yourself?) will sometimes be left wondering whether the book is retelling real Apple-history incidents or not.

The zingers you've enjoyed from the blog are here, though less consistently hilarious than you might expect. Sadly, the blog's writing style did not adapt well into the sustained voice you'd expect from a real novel. All the sentences here sound alike: there's little variety of pace or rhythm, and as a result the Jobsian insult-humor punch lines that were the blog's meat and potatoes (ha, vegan joke) instead too often end up as predictable clunkers. The blog is successful partly because it's so topical, with each entry delivering a single point; the book feels meandering and unfocused by comparison.

But you'll still LOL once in a while. There are episodes and moments here as cleverly imagined as anything in the blog, from Jobs prank-calling Sculley to his negotiations with the music industry to his quickly quenched qualms of conscience after visiting a Chinese iPod factory. (Some of this is transcribed verbatim from the blog, in fact, but it's still funny.) It's nice, and sometimes funny, to see the Fake Steve character get a little more room to breathe without having to respond directly to the day's news; just a pity he doesn't have much else to respond to in this awkwardly plotted fake novel.

Summary of Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody

Welcome to the mind, to the world of Fake Steve Jobs. Fake Steve the counterintuitive management guru: “Obviously we can?t literally put our employees? lives at risk. But we have to make them feel that way.? Fake Steve the political hobnobber: “I can see why they keep Nancy Pelosi under wraps. Wacky as a dime watch.? Fake Steve quoting friend/musician/philosopher Bono on road etiquette: “Tink about dat next toim yer cuttin off some bloke and you don?t know who it is, right? Could be Jay-sus. Or Boutros Boutros-Ghali or sumfin.? And on, yes, himself: “Geniuses have feelings, too.? In the tradition of Thank You for Smoking and in the spirit of The Onion, Options is a novelistic sendup and takedown of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., as viewed by a central character who exists, to his immense self-satisfaction, at the crossroads of all three worlds: “It?s like in one of those movies where a guy realizes he?s got telekinetic powers and it?s just too bad if he doesn?t want them, he?s got them. Likewise, I have this gift. It?s who I am.?

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