Walter Issacson is a well known writer and a biographer and is known for his biographies on Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Issacson was requested by Steve Jobs in 2004 to write his biography when he was diagnosed of pancreatic cancer. Issacson conducted about 40 interviews with Steve Jobs and above 100 with family, friends, colleagues, competitors and even with people who had ill experiences with Jobs. He was given exclusive and unprecedented access by Jobs to write the biography. This book is about a person; who was a great thinker, innovator and a genius entrepreneur who touched and changed the world of technology, music & animation industry, and computers & mobile phones industry. And yet he was human; he was controlling, manipulative, and had his share of failures and successes.

Steve Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara jobs. They lived in Palo Alto, San Francisco at the time when Silicon Valley was flourishing. His parents were open about his adoption to him from an early age and always told him that they picked him because he was special and different. Though he felt abandoned by his birth parents; he always knew he was special and a chosen one. Paul Jobs who was an automobile technician introduced his son to the world of design and engineering. His knack for making things look simple, neat and beautiful; even the part of the craft or tinkered part of a car which was not visible from the outside had highly influenced Steve in becoming a perfectionist which we see in all the Apple products today. Steve was no doubt an intelligent child with higher IQ for his age at pre-school because of which he was often bored in his class and always found himself in trouble for playing pranks. His parents and teachers agreed on skipping one grade to keep him interested at school. When he was in high school, he realized he had immense