Today we’re going to look at two different memoirs from famous people. First, we’ll talk about Steve Wozniak’s look at his life in iWoz and then we’ll talk about Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking.

iWoz

Steve Wozniak is the other founding Steve of Apple Computer. He’s the technical brain that invented the first Apple computers. He was the one that could make the dreams of Steve Jobs live in practical ways. He is also the far less hard-driving amiable Steve in the iconic partnership that started one of the biggest companies in the world.

Throughout this book, Wozniak told the story of his life. One of the threads that seemed random but then came together was all the random projects he took on that culminated in him having all the skill needed to design and build the first Apple computers.

Because he cloned Pong and built Breakout, and hacked TVs to get signals into them, and spent years drawing diagrams of circuits he had all the skills needed to make a large advancement in what computers were at the time. This lined up with what Innovators got across, that it was a bunch of things that came together at the right time to bring us computers.

Innovators focused more on the cross-pollination than iWoz did, but you can see the collaboration there too. Wozniak admits that Jobs was the better marketer that got the computers moving forward. Their collaboration was required at the time to make Apple happen.

If you’re interested in the other Steve that made Apple, I enjoyed this book. While some of the sentences were word for word repetitive, overall I now want to meet Wozniak because he seems like that kind uncle you always loved and was ready for a joke with you despite the decorum your parents expected.

Purchase iWoz on Amazon

Wishful Drinking

Yup, I like Star Wars and when I’ve heard Carrie Fisher speak I’ve enjoyed the interviews and her candid, sometimes crass responses. I was hoping for more of that with this book.

Unfortunately what I got was a jumbled mess of stories about stuff that happened in a famous person’s life. The only reason this book got off the ground was that Carrie is already famous and her name would sell books.

Evidently, I fell for it because I bought the book and read it.

There were glimmers of more than just a famous person telling stories, but they were fleeting. I give her props for talking about her mental health struggles and her drug struggles, but these were small portions amongst lots of stories that seemed to hold no real weight.

I wouldn’t recommend reading this unless you need to add extra books to your yearly total because it’s short and the print is large. You’ll get through it fast.

Purchase Wishful Drinking on Amazon

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