Today is launch day for Steve Jobs in Exile. I spent almost four years digging into Steve's stretch in the wilderness -- 1985 to 1997, after Apple pushed him out and before it brought him back.
I expected the record to be complete. What more could there be on the most written-about entrepreneur alive? I was wrong. An archivist at Carnegie Mellon told me I was the first person in about fifteen years to open the NeXT archive. People had been holding letters, tapes, memos, recordings in their closets for decades, waiting to show someone. More than a hundred of them sat down with me.
They didn't tell me about the genius-or-tyrant caricature. This was a younger Steve, mostly off-camera, nearly bankrupt, learning the hard way. Out now, order link below.