????The best-laid plans of authors and publishers often go awry when the bookstores get their copies.
????Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs -- the most hotly anticipated biography in years, at least in some circles -- was supposed to have a dramatic worldwide laydown on Monday. But to the distress of Isaacson, Simon & Schuster and the dozens of publications that bought first or second serial rights, some reporters got their hands on the 630-page volume on Thursday. Result: The flood of revelations began four days early.
????Our cheat-sheet, with links to the sources (ALERT -- Multiple spoilers ahead):
????* Steve Jobs refers to his biological parents as his "sperm and egg bank" (Associated Press)
????* He had high praise for Paul Jobs' work ethic. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see." (New York Times book review)
????* He was bullied in school (AP) and learned to fight back verbally. "He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed," writes Isaacson (NYT book review)
????* He gave up Christianity at age 13 when he saw starving children on the cover of Life magazine. (AP)
????* As a teenager, he loved King Lear, Moby Dick and the poetry of Dylan Thomas (Huffington Post)
????* He was returning from an apple farm on one of his fruitarian diets when he chose the name of his company (AP)
????* He told John Sculley (the former Pepsi exec who ousted Jobs) that if he hadn't started Apple (AAPL) he might have been a poet in Paris (HuffPo)
????* He calls the crop of executives brought in to run Apple after he left "corrupt people" with "corrupt values" (AP)
????* He is contemptuous of the people at Microsoft (and, to some extent, Google), whom he sees as pure technologists, with no humanities and liberal arts in their DNA. "They just didn't get it. Even when they saw the Mac they couldn't even copy it well." (60 Minutes Overtime, via CNET)
????* He calls Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive his "spiritual partner" and says that no one but Jobs had the authority to tell him what to do. (AP) "Most people in Steve's life are replaceable," says Jobs' wife Laurene Powell. "But not Jony." (Mercury News)
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