Steve Jobs

Gr 4–6—This worshipful entry in the series gives the late, great entrepreneur's career a once-over so shallow that it never even mentions his birth parents, his formative sojourn to India, or Apple's iCloud. Focusing less on Jobs's personal life than on his public triumphs, the author points approvingly to his subject's often abrasive intensity, his maniacal fussiness about details, and his brilliant business strategy of turning Apple into a brand as keys to his string of uncommon successes. Notable associates, such as Steve Wozniak and Apple's design guru Jonathan Ive, do receive nods for their contributions, and Jobs's less-than-stellar experience with his NeXT start-up also gets brief attention. Ending with a simplistic recipe for entrepreneurial excellence (have a better idea, take chances, keep going), this mix of small color photos interspersed with sound-bite quotes and well-separated paragraphs of short-sentenced narrative is capped with a multimedia resource list and suggested research topics. It offers standard assignment information but little beyond the news of Jobs's demise that can't be drawn from older biographies, or in more specific detail in Karen Blumenthal's perceptive Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different (Feiwel & Friends, 2012).—John Peters, formerly at New York Public Library