Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs - A Parody (Hardcover)

by Fake Steve Jobs (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this tedious parody of the life of Apple founder Steve Jobs, the pseudonymous Fake Steve Jobs (identified in the New York Times this month as Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons) offers a gleeful sendup of the real Steve Jobs set amid the recent stock options backdating scandal. Throughout, the fake Steve pontificates on everything from his superior management skills (only promote stupid people) to his role in the development of the iPhone (it involves a lot of non-thinking meditation), and is portrayed as a cold, callow narcissist. Blissfully unaware of the legal firestorm raging around him, a mathlexic Fake Steve goes about his daily business, balancing meditation with the firing of employees while the Apple board of directors scrambles to avoid prison time and find a scapegoat. As the fictitious Apple corporation implodes, Fake Steve must decide whether to jump ship or stand by the company. Tech industry watchers who know (or know of) the players will get a kick out of seeing them skewered, but readers who aren't already tuned in to the Silicon Valley technocracy may not quite get it. Fake Steve doesn't really evolve as a character, but as a grotesque caricature, he's fun to watch. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"A funny send-up of Apple's CEO, the go-go culture of Silicon Valley, and the cult of Mac, iPhone, and iPod." -- Boston Globe, 10/14/07

"A wickedly funny, first-person parody...Politically incorrect and breezy...oPtion$ skewers Silicon Valley, with touches of `Bonfire of the Vanities,' `Dilbert' and `Revenge of the Nerds.'" -- Associated Press

"Just as Tom Wolfe skewered Wall Street in the `80s, Fake Steve lights a mini-Bonfire in Silicon Valley...The narrator of this dead-tree account is so textured and real that even his most idle thoughts amuse...A-." -- Entertainment Weekly, 10/19/07

"Kind of fun, especially if you're a computer geek." -- Kirkus Reviews, 8/15/07

"This over-the-top send-up of Valley excess isn't a best-of anthology. It's a surprisingly cohesive narrative." -- Wired, October 2007

"Tongue-in-cheek and piquantly insiderish...The book weaves the blog's greatest hits into a cohesive narrative that enfolds recent events at Apple...Mr. Lyons's portrait is hilarious and eerily specific; you get the feeling he planted a spycam in one of Mr. Jobs's mock turtles." -- Liesl Schillinger, New York Times, 10/7/07

"I couldn't put it down. Somehow, Fake Steve's--I mean Lyons'--style, is compelling." -- New York Post

"In the establishment-skewering tradition of Voltaire, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne we now have a voice for our own digital age...Mac-slappingly funny...The book is hilarious." -- Newsweek.com

"Lyons inspires our prurient, page-turning fascination with a thoroughly unlikable narrator whose antics are at once unbelievable and vaguely plausible...Readers familiar with the Silicon Valley scene will have fun guessing who the pseudonymous characters represent...The novel is peppered with deft comic touches...Even the real Steve Jobs, who isn't known for his ability to laugh at himself, might want to pick it up for a quick, self-enlightening way to pass some time on the Jobs Jet." -- Katie Hafner, New York Times Book Review

"Lyons, using the same hilarious voice he created for the blog, tells the story of a Fortune 500 chief executive hippie Reed College dropout...Sheer hubris, seemingly never ending, is what makes this novel such a romp. You know he's going down, and it just makes you feel, well, happy." -- Los Angeles Times

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (October 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306815842
• ISBN-13: 978-0306815843
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #61,578 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Seems Too Real to be Fake!, December 3, 2007

By	Joe Wikert "[e-mail]" (Fishers, IN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Looking for the perfect gift for the Apple fan in your life? If so, your search is over. Get them a copy of Options by Fake Steve Jobs, AKA Daniel Lyons. If you're not already aware, Lyons has been writing a blog called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for quite awhile and it features some of the best sarcasm and wit on the planet. He leveraged that fame and fortune to write Options, which takes a fictitious and hilarious look at the Apple stock option backdating scandal.

The Fake Steve blog is a treat to read but I couldn't help wonder whether the style and approach would get old in a book length work. Boy, was I wrong. Daniel Lyons is a genius. He describes events in such fascinating detail that you not only feel you're there but you assume they actually occurred!

My personal favorite is the point towards the end of the book when Jobs meets with Yoko Ono to discuss reselling The Beatles library on iTunes. I won't spoil it by divulging too much here but I laughed out loud more than once while picturing this meeting in my head. There's also a funny twist to the ending, which again, I won't spill the beans on here.

Still not sold? Read this piece from the back cover and tell me it doesn't hit the nail on the head:

"Sometimes I feel like a great chef who has devoted his entire life to monastic study of the art of cooking. I've gathered the finest ingredients, built the most advanced kitchen and prepared the most exquisite meal. So perfect, so delicious, so extraordinary. More astounding than any meal ever created. Yet each day I stand in my window and watch 97% of the world walk past my restaurant into the McDonald's across the street."

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars El Jobso couldn't have designed this book, because it's not perfect, May 20, 2008

By	Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews

For starters, this book has some packaging problems. You'd never know from the wrapper that it was meant to be a novel, rather than (as you might expect, based on the blog) a collection of short essay-like zingers about the tech industry. And while the jacket designer picked the right font (Myriad) the book as a whole suggests not The Steve's aesthetic perfectionism but a cynical make-it-shiny-it'll-sell approach. For goodness' sake, the glue used in this book's binding *smells* terrible. Neither Fake nor Real Steve should have permitted that kind of sloppiness to be attached to his name.

Moving on to substance: this book doesn't have much. The plot, such as it is, is driven by El Jobso's "persecution" by the SEC for options backdating, which causes him to think about dropping out of the industry. This topic is less than gripping, even for Apple cultists. It's dressed up with some enjoyable boardroom backstabbing and we see Steve fire and betray numerous colleagues in amusingly derisory fashion. But the long-form plot you might want from a novel is mostly missing, as the book is written in episodic little nuggets whose connections are sometimes unmotivated. And the Fake Steve character doesn't really develop, beyond the shallowest of eventual revelations (he doesn't really believe he invented the iPod; he worries but then eventually just accepts that he's sociopathically selfish). Meanwhile the novel's other characters are an awkward mix of real names (Jobs loves to get stoned with Larry Ellison, and Hillary Clinton turns out to be kind of mean, ha ha) with fictional and/or fictionalized ones (most of the other Apple staff we meet, the designers and engineers and board members, are composites). You get the feeling some real publishing lawyer told Fake Steve to tone it down at risk of a libel suit, and as a result we're left with a roman a clef whose key doesn't unlock much of interest. Even people who attend WWDC and have read Sculley's autobiography (why would you do that to yourself?) will sometimes be left wondering whether the book is retelling real Apple-history incidents or not.

The zingers you've enjoyed from the blog are here, though less consistently hilarious than you might expect. Sadly, the blog's writing style did not adapt well into the sustained voice you'd expect from a real novel. All the sentences here sound alike: there's little variety of pace or rhythm, and as a result the Jobsian insult-humor punch lines that were the blog's meat and potatoes (ha, vegan joke) instead too often end up as predictable clunkers. The blog is successful partly because it's so topical, with each entry delivering a single point; the book feels meandering and unfocused by comparison.

But you'll still LOL once in a while. There are episodes and moments here as cleverly imagined as anything in the blog, from Jobs prank-calling Sculley to his negotiations with the music industry to his quickly quenched qualms of conscience after visiting a Chinese iPod factory. (Some of this is transcribed verbatim from the blog, in fact, but it's still funny.) It's nice, and sometimes funny, to see the Fake Steve character get a little more room to breathe without having to respond directly to the day's news; just a pity he doesn't have much else to respond to in this awkwardly plotted fake novel.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than Fake!, November 10, 2007

By	Sean P. Kearney (Castle Rock, CO USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As an occasional reader of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog, I picked up this book thinking that it was a collection of the "best of" entries already published. Instead, I was totally surprised to find a coherent novel that is even more engaging and hilarious than the blog that got it started.

I couldn't help reading whole passages out loud to my amazingly patient wife while trying not to laugh. While the satire gets more ramped up with every chapter, a lot of the outrageousness is especially funny because it seems so close to the truth.

While I doubt that Steve Jobs has ever had Sting spoon him on a dirty floor while both tripping on ayahuasca, it's not hard to imagine Jobs ping-ponging between believing he is an under-appreciated genius and wallowing in self-doubt and isolation, not just as a reflection of El Jobso, but as one of our cultural obsession recapturing a lost sense of "childlike wonder."