
The Bite in the Apple by Chrisann Brennan - WoodenChair
I&#x27;m reading The Bite in the Apple by Chrisann Brennan (Steve Jobs first love and mother of his daughter, Lisa) and I must say it&#x27;s a really touching book. It just came out a few days ago. It speaks to a time period (70s) that I know little of; but the imagery is powerful and human emotions&#x2F;relationships are so well expressed that you can feel the decade as you read. Brennan is true to her hippy voice - an authenticity so real that it stands in stark contrast to most modern narratives that you find in memoirs. It&#x27;s the first book I&#x27;ve read in years that I don&#x27;t want to put down.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t recommend this book to anyone without a very deep interest in Steve Jobs Studies. But after 15 years of searching (yes, I&#x27;m a die hard), I think I finally got my first true glimpse of the pre-Apple Steve.<p>Of course TBITA is not a remotely business&#x2F;technical oriented narrative. That&#x27;s what&#x27;s really still missing in the field of Steve Jobs Studies We have some good general histories (Pirates, new movies, Apple books). We have some good personal narratives (Isaacson, Brennan, Wozniak&#x27;s iWoz, and Mona Simpson&#x27;s novel A Regular Guy which is well known to be about him and just an awesome book even if it weren&#x27;t). Yet the best business narrative we have other than magazine cover stories is probably Folklore.org and The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (Deutschman) which Steve himself called &quot;A Hatchet Job.&quot; It&#x27;s certainly an entertaining read (and it still makes an impression) but it doesn&#x27;t cover the important 2000s period, and it&#x27;s a bit too thin to really get into the sort of depth about NeXT, Pixar, and early days at Apple that the field needs. The next best sources are the also-ran Apple CEO memoirs (Amelio, Sculley - which while decent books in themselves are largely self serving and mostly off topic) and primary sources...
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WoodenChair
Since I've written so much about this topic now and gotten carried away I will
say that for someone new to the field of Steve Jobs Studies, the best
introductory sources are the Isaacson biography and Pirates of Silicon Valley
(movie) in my opinion. In fact I could order them like iTunes does for genres
of music:

Essentials: Books: Steve Jobs (Isaacson), General Apple Narratives Movies:
Pirates of Silicon Valley, JOBS (Kutcher movie - haven't seen)

Next Steps: Books: The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (Deutschman), From Pepsi to
Apple (Sculley), iWoz (Wozniak) Movies: Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview; Famous
Keynote Moments

Deep Cuts: Books: My 500 Days at Apple (Amelio), A Regular Guy (Simpson), The
Bite in the Apple (Brennan) Movies: 1984 Mac Introduction, 1985 NeXT
Brainstorming Documentary, NeXT Videos, Other Long Form Interviews, 1997
MacWorld Fireside Chat, More Obscure Keynotes

In the field of Steve Jobs Studies we're so lucky to have several pivotal
figures write books (Simpson, Brennan, Wozniak, Sculley) but for the genre to
really shine we still need a more comprehensive professional narrative. It's
time someone wrote a purely business book set from 1976 through 2011 that
didn't get sidetracked on outside-of-work personal issues. It would probably
need to be about 1000 pages!

