"Steve Jobs: Genius by Design" by Jason Quinn and Amit Tayal

Steve Jobs: Genius by Design by Jason Quinn and Amit Tayal is a graphic novel that details the life and career of Steve Jobs. While reading this book, I couldn't help but laugh at the fact that I had received a text on my iPhone and that I wouldn't even have been able to own one without Steve Jobs. When you really think about it, it is so extraordinary that he had this idea to combine a computer, mp3 player, and telephone into one device, and that that idea became a reality. Getting to know his life story through the means of a graphic novel was really interesting to me. I have not had a ton of experience reading graphic novels (this is only my third), but I feel as if this one had pretty exceptional fluidity. I think adolescents would enjoy this novel just because they probably want to know the man behind all of the products that they use on a daily basis. Also, because it is done in this format of the graphic novel, adolescents will find it the biography more entertaining. Indeed, the author and illustrator has the intention of telling the story of Steve Jobs in an "easy" and "accessible" way, and I believe they really succeeded at that. It is particularly interesting that those were the specific intentions they had because Steve Jobs himself was all about simplifying and making his products easy-to-use. I think out of all of the available biographies out there on Steve Jobs, this is definitely the one that would appeal most to adolescents. While I am not sure  I would actually include this in my curriculum, I would definitely want it in my classroom library.

I myself had not been very familiar with the life story of Steve Jobs, so this was a very informative text for me. Particularly, the aspects that Quinn and Tayal included about his personal life were fascinating to me (ie his adoption and his parents, his own life as a father, his diet, his religious views, etc). By including these details, I think Quinn and Tayal did a wonderful job of painting a full, complex portrait of who this man was. After watching Sara's book trailer in class, I got the impression that the book showed different sides of Steve Jobs and in reading it, I was able to understand and to see those contrasts clearly. He was a very passionate and creative visionary, but at the same time, he was stubborn, merciless, and selfish. Furthermore, his drive for perfection in both appearance and quality led him to have a "reality distortion field," meaning that in many instances, he would not accept anything less than what he had envisioned and sometimes handled the true reality of the way things played out in an extremely childish and/or cruel way. Knowing that Steve Jobs had these multiple sides to him, I think it is interesting for adolescents to observe his morality and decide whether being a "genius" excuses wrongful behavior sometimes. If you did want to teach this text in a classroom, it might be fun and insightful to include a debate activity because I could definitely see where students would have conflicting opinions and be able to argue from either standpoint. Also, in teaching this text, you would need to make sure students know how to read a graphic novel, specifically in terms of examining the way that text and image combine to form meaning. For example, throughout the book, lyrics to Bob Dylan songs are written across the pages to match up with Steve's life experience in that moment. Students should be challenged to look past the superficial meaning (the lyrics are included because Steve Jobs was a huge fan of Bob Dylan), and draw deeper conclusions (Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan were both American visionaries).