Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

PRAISE FOR WALTER ISAACSON’S Steve Jobs “This biography is essential reading.” —The New York Times, Holiday Gift Guide “A superbly told story of a superbly lived life.” —The Wall Street Journal “Enthralling.” —The New Yorker “A frank, smart and wholly unsentimental biography . . . a remarkably sharp, hi-res portrait . . . Steve Jobs is more than a good book; it’s an urgently necessary one.” —Time “An encyclopedic survey of all that Mr. Jobs accomplished, replete with the passion and excitement that it

—Entertainment Weekly “For the generation that’s grown up in a world where computers are the norm, smartphones feel like fifth limbs and music comes from the Internet rather than record and CD stores, Steve Jobs is must-read history. . . . The intimate chapters, where Jobs’s personal side shines through, with all his faults and craziness, leave a deep impression. There’s humor, too . . . it’s a rich portrait of one of the greatest minds of our generation.” —Associated Press “Isaacson’s biography can be read in several ways. It is on the one hand a history of the most exciting time in the age of computers, when the machines first became personal and later, fashionable accessories. It is also a textbook study of the rise and fall and rise of Apple and the brutal clashes that destroyed friendships and careers. And it is a gadget lover’s dream, with fabulous, inside accounts of how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad came into being. But more than anything, Isaacson has crafted a biography of a complicated, peculiar personality

was charming, loathsome, lovable, obsessive, maddening—and the author shows how Jobs’s character was instrumental in shaping some of the greatest technological innovations of our time.” —The Washington Post “A wonderfully robust biography that not only tracks Jobs’s life but also serves as a history of digital technology. What makes the book come alive, though, is Isaacson’s ability to shape the story as a kind of archetypal fantasy: the flawed hero, the noble quest, the holy grail, the death of the king.” —Booklist “A nuanced, balanced portrait that is sure to become mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in big business and popular culture . . . Isaacson is to be commended for explaining the genius of Jobs in fascinating fashion, launching a discussion that could reach infinity and beyond.” —The Christian Science Monitor

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“Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs comes as a breath of fresh air . . . a reliable and captivating guide to a man who reshaped the computing industry and more.” —CNET.com “It’s a testament to Isaacson’s skill as a biographer that readers can at last obtain the picture of Steve Jobs as a human being rather than a legend . . . anyone who’s ever wondered how so very much about the technology landscape has changed so fundamentally in just thirty-five years, owes it to themselves to read this book.” —TUAW.com “Walter Isaacson’s book is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. . . . Steve Jobs’s life was a great story with a near mythic arc, and Isaacson captures it well . . . the book moves at a fast pace with a great eye for detail. . . . Isaacson is perceptive and original.” —CultofMac.com “Isaacson’s biography lives up to the hype, showing

readers the private turbulence that spurred Jobs to public greatness.” —ShelfAwareness.com “A scrupulously fair chronicle.” —The New York Review of Books “Isaacson’s book is studded with moments that make you go ‘wow.’ ” —The Guardian “If you are interested in the history of the digital age and the emergence of digital culture, Isaacson’s book is a must read.” —Technorati.com “An irresistible glimpse into his complex and often contradictory life.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A riveting book, with as much to say ...

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CONTENTS Epigraph Characters Introduction: How This Book Came to Be CHAPTER ONE Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen CHAPTER TWO Odd Couple: The Two Steves CHAPTER THREE The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In . . . CHAPTER FOUR Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design

Dawn of a New Age CHAPTER SEVEN Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward CHAPTER FOURTEEN Enter Sculley: The Pepsi Challenge CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Launch: A Dent in the Universe CHAPTER SIXTEEN Gates and Jobs: When Orbits Intersect CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Icarus: What Goes Up . . . CHAPTER EIGHTEEN NeXT: Prometheus Unbound CHAPTER NINETEEN Pixar: Technology Meets Art CHAPTER TWENTY A Regular Guy: Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Family Man: At Home with the Jobs Clan CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Toy Story: Buzz and Woody to the Rescue CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE The Second Coming: What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . . CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Restoration: The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Think Different: Jobs as iCEO CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The iMac: Hello (Again) CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT CEO: Still Crazy after All These Years

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Apple Stores: Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone CHAPTER THIRTY The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE The iTunes Store: I’m the Pied Piper CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Music Man: The Sound Track of His Life CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Pixar’s Friends: . . . and Foes CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Twenty-first-century Macs: Setting Apple Apart CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Round One:...

Round Two: The Cancer Recurs CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT The iPad: Into the Post-PC Era CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE New Battles: And Echoes of Old Ones CHAPTER FORTY To Infinity: The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Round Three: The Twilight Struggle CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Legacy: The Brightest Heaven ...

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CHARACTERS AL ALCORN. Chief engineer at Atari, who designed Pong and hired Jobs. GIL AMELIO. Became CEO of Apple in 1996, bought NeXT, bringing Jobs back. BILL ATKINSON. Early Apple employee, developed graphics for the Macintosh. CHRISANN BRENNAN. Jobs’s girlfriend at Homestead High, mother of his daughter Lisa. LISA BRENNAN-JOBS. Daughter of Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, born in 1978; became a writer in New York City. NOLAN BUSHNELL. Founder of Atari and entrepreneurial role model for Jobs. BILL CAMPBELL. Apple marketing chief during Jobs’s first stint at Apple and board member and confidant after

Jobs’s return in 1997. EDWIN CATMULL. A cofounder of Pixar and later a Disney executive. KOBUN CHINO. A Sōtō Zen master in California who became Jobs’s spiritual teacher. LEE CLOW. Advertising wizard who created Apple’s “1984” ad and worked with Jobs for three decades. DEBORAH “DEBI” COLEMAN. Early Mac team manager who took over Apple manufacturing. TIM COOK. Steady, calm, chief operating officer hired by Jobs in 1998; replaced Jobs as Apple CEO in August 2011. EDDY CUE. Chief of Internet services at Apple, Jobs’s wingman in dealing with content companies. ANDREA “ANDY” CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna’s firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs. LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs.

TONY FADELL. Punky engineer brought to Apple in 2001 to develop the iPod. SCOTT FORSTALL. Chief of Apple’s mobile device software. ROBERT FRIEDLAND. Reed student, proprietor of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker who influenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company. JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE. Apple’s manager in France, took over the Macintosh division when Jobs was ousted in 1985. BILL GATES. The other computer wunderkind born in 1955. ANDY HERTZFELD. Playful, friendly software engineer and Jobs’s pal on the original Mac team. JOANNA HOFFMAN. Original Mac team member with the spirit to stand up to Jobs. ELIZABETH HOLMES. Daniel Kottke’s girlfriend at Reed and early Apple employee. ROD HOLT. Chain-smoking Marxist hired by Jobs in 1976 to be the electrical engineer on the Apple II. ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005.

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TONY FADELL. Punky engineer brought to Apple in 2001 to develop the iPod. SCOTT FORSTALL. Chief of Apple’s mobile device software. ROBERT FRIEDLAND. Reed student, proprietor of an apple farm commune, and spiritual seeker who influenced Jobs, then went on to run a mining company. JEAN-LOUIS GASSÉE. Apple’s manager in France, took over the Macintosh division when Jobs was ousted in 1985. BILL GATES. The other computer wunderkind born in 1955. ANDY HERTZFELD. Playful, friendly software engineer and Jobs’s pal on the original Mac team. JOANNA HOFFMAN. Original Mac team member with the spirit to stand up to Jobs. ELIZABETH HOLMES. Daniel Kottke’s girlfriend at Reed and early Apple employee. ROD HOLT. Chain-smoking Marxist hired by Jobs in 1976 to be the electrical engineer on the Apple II. ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005.

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JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN” JANDALI. Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno. CLARA HAGOPIAN JOBS. Daughter of Armenian immigrants, married Paul Jobs in 1946; they adopted Steve soon after his birth in 1955. ERIN JOBS. Middle child of Laurene Powell and Steve Jobs. EVE JOBS. Youngest child of Laurene and Steve. PATTY JOBS. Adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs two years after they adopted Steve. PAUL REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who...

JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advis...

LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs. JOHN SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discov...

(The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and marke...

Chief Operating ...

INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to

take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet know that taking a long walk was his preferred way to have a serious conversation. It turned out that he wanted me to write a biography of him. I had recently published one on Benjamin Franklin and was writing one about Albert Einstein, and my initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. Because I assumed that he was still in the middle of an oscillating career that had many more ups and downs left, I demurred. Not now, I said. Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire. I had known him since 1984, when he came to Manhattan to have lunch with Time’s editors and extol his new Macintosh. He was petulant even then, attacking a Time correspondent for having wounded him with a story that was too revealing. But talking to him afterward, I found myself rather captivated, as so many others have been over the years, by his engaging intensity. We stayed in touch, even after he was ousted from Apple. When he had something to pitch, such as a NeXT computer or Pixar movie, the beam of his charm would suddenly refocus on me, and he would take me to a sushi restaurant in Lower Manhattan to tell me that whatever he was touting was the best thing he had ever produced. I liked him.

When he was restored to the throne at Apple, we put him on the cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering me his ideas for a series we were doing on the most influential people of the century. He had launched his “Think Different” campaign, featuring iconic photos of some of the same people we were considering, and he found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinat...

and then. At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn’t. That started an exchange about the early history of Apple, and I found myself gathering string on the subject, just in case I ever decided to do such a book. When my Einstein biography came out, he came to a book event in Palo Alto and pulled me aside to suggest, again, that he would make a good subject. His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever re...

taken a second medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised me by readily acknowledging that he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. “It’s your book,” he said. “I won’t even read it.” But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though I didn’t know it, was hit by another round of cancer complications. He stopped returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a while. Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the af...

healthy enough to join them. He was in a reflective mood, and we talked for more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get parts. Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life, since his return to Apple, had been his most productive in terms of creating new products. But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my...

and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive ...

suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century. I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. “I think you’re good at getting people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes

and former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-limits. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” he said. “But I don’t have any skeletons in my closet that can’t be allowed out.” He didn’t seek any control over what I wrote, or even ask to read it in advance. His only involvement came when my publisher was choosing the cover art. When he saw an early version of a proposed cover treatment, he disliked it so much that he asked to have input in designing a new version. I was both amused and willing, so I readily assented. I ended up having more than forty interviews and conversations with him. Some were formal ones in his Palo Alto living room, others were done during long walks and drives or by telephone. During my two years of visits, he became increasingly intimate and revealing, though at times I witnessed what his veteran colleagues at

Apple used to call his “reality distortion field.” Sometimes it was the inadvertent misfiring of memory cells that happens to us all; at other times he was spinning his own version of reality both to me and to himself. To check and flesh out his story, I interviewed more than a hundred friends, relatives, competitors, adversaries, and colleagues. His wife also did not request any restrictions or control, nor did she ask to see in advance what I would publish. In fact she strongly encouraged me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early ...

succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for

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digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his

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colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Shakespeare’s Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention.” For Steve Jobs, the ascent

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to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of growing up in a valley that was just learning how to turn silicon into gold.

Paul Jobs with Steve, 1956

The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born

In the Homestead High yearbook, 1972

With the “SWAB JOB” school prank sign

CHAPTER ONE CHILDHOOD Abandoned and Chosen The Adoption When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter

of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later. Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself

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in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman. Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life. Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman. Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a “repo man,” picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process. There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wa...

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Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria. Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a “traditional

Muslim woman” who was a “conservative, obedient housewife.” Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science. In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdu...

unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions. Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs. When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. ...