Overwhelming "take home" from reading this book: Peter Jackson is an ultra-focused, driven, creative person who loves movies, and wants to make them the way HE wants. He will not be deterred in any way from what he wants to do.OK-who is this book NOT for?While this book is a biography, it has an extremely specific/narrow focus on his professional career. I mention this because this book is so focused on this one aspect of Peter Jackson's life, that if you are looking for something else than what this book focuses on, you probably won't be interested in this book. Also, if you are only interested in Peter Jackson's work on LOTR and, to a lesser extent, King Kong (forget the Hobbit movies, this book came out about 10 years ago-WELL before the Hobbit movies, in their current iteration, were even "on the radar"...), you won't find what you're looking for until about the last third of the book. The first two thirds of the book focus on his early work that very few people have seen, and covers a great deal of his early "splatter" movies. I've read plenty of biographies of people that are "sprawling" and spend equal times recounting a person's personal life as well as whatever aspect of their life they are famous for. If you are looking for a lot about the "man behind the world-famous director", this book won't DIRECTLY give you that insight. INDIRECTLY you learn a lot about Peter Jackson as a person, but only what you can glean through his actions with respect to his job, not through any "personal" stories in the book, because there really aren't any.While the beginning of the book does briefly go through Peter Jackson's life as a kid, there are not a lot of personal anecdotes-the majority of things shared from his early days as a kid revolve around the way his obviously-loving parents supported his dreams of becoming a film maker (going so far as to build a no-frills, yet substantial, addition of a built-in garage to their house for him to have a working space as an aspiring special effects person/movie maker.A GREAT deal of time is spent showing the "business" and "politics" of how movies get made in Hollywood. While Peter Jackson says throughout the book how much he detests these facets of film making, he had to deal with it quite a bit in the early years of his career as he was constantly struggling to find financial backing for his films. As I said, the book is ultra-focused on his professional career, so a great deal of the book covers correspondence back and forth between Peter Jackson and the New Zealand film commission-a national entity charged with strategically funding promising New Zealand film makers. There are TONS of excerpts of letters back and forth that highlight Peter Jackson's humble, yet focused, unapologetic approach to doing whatever he needed to do in order to get his movies made.While the book never "bogs down" with data/financials in the depiction of the intricacies of movie making, it does provide enough in-depth discussion of the way movies are made so that it felt like the introduction to a college course about film making.If you are like me and enjoy immensely the behind the scenes footage that was included with the LOTR and King Kong extended edition DVD movies, you will find plenty of that type of material in this book. Those items are covered more in-depth in the DVD's since they can use visuals to accompany the interviews, but the thought process/design considerations get a good amount of coverage in this book.I found this book to be inspirational not so much because I am a lover of Peter Jackson's LOTR and King Kong movies (which I am a HUGE fan of), but because of what came through LOUD AND CLEAR throughout the entire book:a) He is a humble, unassuming man who is absolutely passionate about film making;b) He is FIERCELY loyal to New Zealand and the people with whom he works-the same people follow him from project to project;c) His genuinely friendly, calm, funny nature and commitment to the work make him a charismatic leader who gets people behind the scenes, and on screen, to give more of themselves than they would have otherwise agreed to;d) He has a youthful/kid-like exuberance for what he does and has clearly created the life for himself that he always wanted!