| In Association With... |  |
|
|
|
Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody | 
 enlarge | Author: Fake Steve Jobs
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $4.99
You Save: $17.96 (78%)
New (6) from $4.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 63737
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B001AQVT94
Publication Date: October 18, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.”
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Perfect book sequel to Pirates of Silicon Valley August 23, 2008
Although this is not a true sequel to Pirates of Silicon Valley, it will please anyone who liked the 1999s movie.
The book is truly well written and very, very funny. It is a "must buy" for anyone that likes to follow the Valley news and gossip.
Steve is portrayed in such a coherent way along the book, that sometimes you may even forget that the author is faking. And, perhaps surprisingly, although the book was made from blog posts, there is a storyline and the whole book is consistently funny.
While reading, in many times I have laughed loudly; it is a very pleasureful reading. The book certainly has many peeks, including all Larry Ellison's episodes, annoying lawyers with their Windows notebooks (always rebooting) and Zune players, Steve's zen style and many others.
 El Jobso couldn't have designed this book, because it's not perfect May 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Very Entertaining! April 27, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a very entertaining novel on the fake Steve Jobs. It's easy to see Jobso in my mind dong and reacting to each situation in the book. If you like the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog, get the book.
 Book funny. Me laugh. You buy. March 23, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book thoroughly. I do wonder how the CEO of a company like Apple can write a book like this and get away with it tho.... Sorry what? Not the real Steve Jobs?! Oh. Well if is all just made up, I guess it's alright.. Would have been better if it were true though. Yeah, so it's OK. Bummed.
To know Steve Jobs... February 11, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book was just too funny! I loved it! And I usually don't read books of this genre, but being a huge Apple fan, I couldn't turn it down. It was a much needed break from my typical genre of Mysteries and Suspense. I highly recommend this book!
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
