Nightly News bought a copy of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which goes on sale next week, for an early and often poignant look into the world of a brilliant man who changed our world.

Here are some of the authors and titles that inspired Jobs:

- Williams Shakespeare
- Dylan Thomas
- Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
- Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
- Frances Moore Lappe, Diet for a Small Planet
- Arnold Ehret, Mucusless Diet Healing System

Nightly News bought a copy of Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which goes on sale next week, for an early and often poignant look into the world of a brilliant man who changed our world.

Among Steve Jobs' favorite artists were Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, his onetime girlfriend Joan Baez, Aretha Franklin, B. B. King, Buddy Holly, Buffalo Springfield, Don McLean, Donovan, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, John Mellencamp, Simon and Garfunkel and The Monkees ("I'm a Believer").

Isaacson writes that only about a quarter of the songs were from more contemporary artists such as Alicia Keys, Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Dido, Green Day, John Mayer, Moby, U2, Seal and Talking Heads.

Jobs enjoyed classical music, too, including Yo-Yo Ma and Bach, his favorite classical composer.

By George Lewis, NBC News

Dr. Margaret Martin's enthusiasm and passion are infectious.  "We're saving kids' lives!" she proclaims.

Because of her, 1,500 youngsters from the gang-infested neighborhoods of Los Angeles are off the streets and spending their spare time in youth orchestras sponsored by the Harmony Project, which she started a decade ago. Kids accepted into the program are given free musical tutoring and instruments, provided they sign a contract that they will finish school and not drop out. On Thursday, President Obama awarded a Presidential Citizen's Medal to Martin, one of 13 Americans to receive the 2011 award.

"Our students learn discipline, persistence, confidence, accountability for the use of their time," Martin said, "and they learn to collaborate well with others in an ensemble."

Those students agree. "The music really made me focus more in school and made me concentrate," said Harmony Project violinist Andrea Garcia during a break in a Saturday practice session, "it releases my stress and I don't get angry as much."

Mizael Reyes, another violinist, chimed in. "I know that you have to put effort into music so I have to put effort into everything else if I want to accomplish anything," he said.

Margaret Martin knows about hard times.  She said that as a young mother, she walked out of an abusive marriage and lived for a time in an empty office building. 

Gesturing toward herself, Martin said, "This is the face of poverty in the United States."

After she turned her own life around and earned a Ph.D. in public health, Martin resolved to give something back. And then something happened that inspired her.

She started Harmony Project, she said, because she saw a group of gang members stop at a farmer's market in front of a child playing Brahms on a violin.

That little kid was Martin's young son Max, trying to earn a few extra dollars as a sidewalk musician. At first she was scared that the gang members would try to harm him, but then she noticed they were entranced by the music and began digging into their pockets, putting money in Max's violin case.

"In that moment," she said, "they were teaching me that they would rather be doing what that kid was doing than what they were doing but they never had the chance."

Giving youngsters that chance is what drives the Harmony Project and its highly passionate, highly articulate founder.

"Kids will rise to the level of your expectations," Martin said.  "You just have to have great expectations, and they do.  They are precious resources."

She has acquired a powerful ally in Gustavo Dudamel, the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the product of the youth orchestra program in his native Venezuela.

"We couldn't do what we do without the support of our partners," Martin said.

Now, the woman who turned hard times into harmony hopes to replicate the project in other cities.  And she's having fun planning the expansion.

"It IS a lot of fun," she said, "It's the best job ever!"

Mark Potter / NBC News

Juan and Gina Montes from Miami discuss how difficult their financial situation has been since Juan has been out of work for three years.

By Mark Potter, NBC News Correspondent  

MIAMI – In a well-kept home along a quiet street, Juan Montes practices his guitar and hopes it will bring temporary respite from the worries, shame and financial pressures of long-term unemployment in America.

For nearly 30 years, Montes worked in construction to support his family. After he was laid off from U.S. Steel in Ohio in 1983, he became a wallpaper installer. He then moved to South Florida in 1991 and eventually got a general contractor’s license. He did remodeling jobs, home additions, office construction and build-outs of medical facilities. Then three years ago, as the United States fell into recession, the bottom fell out of the construction industry and the 57-year-old hasn't been able to find work since.

Without work, Montes and his wife have run out of money. Her part-time job as an assistant administrator for a retirement fund doesn't cover expenses and provides no insurance. The family faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and this once proud provider is now feeling very low emotionally. 

"It makes you feel like less of a man," Montes said. "When you've done everything for yourself all your life and it's not there anymore, that security, it's a bad feeling."

Worst of all, Montes recently had to ask his grown son for help in paying his utility bill. "I'm not supposed to be asking my son for help. I'm supposed to be helping him."

Upset with Washington
Montes' wife, Gina, is frustrated with the endless bickering among politicians and the lack of progress in Washington toward improving the economy and adding jobs. She wishes members of Congress would stand in her shoes for a while and feel what it’s like to have to struggle to make ends meet.

"We've been begging and borrowing and humiliating ourselves. Let them see how that feels, let them know that it's not good," she said.

When asked how she believes elected representatives would feel if they actually did walk in her shoes, she replied, "They wouldn't feel very good right now. They would not. They would feel like something has to be done."

Her husband believes Congress is "oblivious" to the emotional and financial suffering of the unemployed. "I don't sleep, I sleep an hour here, I sleep an hour there. I walk the house, what am I going to do?" Montes said.

He agrees with his wife that politicians need to reach agreement on how to create jobs. "They've just got to stop fighting with each other. We're supposed to be all Americans!"

‘I don't know how I'm going to make it’
Michael McGowan from Farmington Hills, near Detroit, has been teaching music at elementary and middle schools for 17 years, but is now looking for work. He recently received a notice by mail that he will be laid off.

"I was very, very shocked. You wouldn't think that having a job for 17 years that you'd be looking at something like this." The 43-year-old father of two children, including a daughter approaching college age, is now deeply concerned about his future. 

"I don't know how I'm going to make it. I don't know how I'm going to make my mortgage, how I'm going to make all those bills." 

He has told his kids that everything will be fine, but isn't certain about how they really feel about it. "I don't know if they understand," he said. "Sure they know what's happening, but I don't think the actual ramifications have set in yet."

Crowded jobs fair
In Southaven, Miss., more than 800 miles from the gridlock on Capitol Hill, an employment fair this week drew more than 2,500 people seeking the approximately 500 jobs being offered by local employers.

Among the many faces in the long lines was that of Glyn Jenkins, who had lost her job at a mental health facility. "You just don't know which way to turn and it's hard to get support, because there are so many people out there in the same boat."

Charles Kimler, who is in his 50s, came to the job fair wearing a suit, hoping to find work after losing his job of 30 years in the service industry. His girlfriend helps him as much as she can, but Kimler said he still can't pay all his bills now. 

Mark Potter / NBC News

Glyn Jenkins, who lost her job at a mental facility, recently visited a job fair, along with 2,500 other people, in Southhaven, Miss.

"I'm basically broke," he said. "I don't sleep at night, you know, it's just a constant strain on my emotions and my psyche and everything else."

Another job seeker, Patricia Allen, used to own a small house cleaning business until it folded during the economic downturn. She is frustrated by going on job interviews but never getting a call back. And she is angry with America's political leaders. 

"They are out of touch in Washington, they're definitely out of touch," she said. "When election time comes they talk about what they're going to do, and when you put them in office they don't live up to their words."

By Amber Payne, NBC Nightly News producer

Playwright Katori Hall says her job is to put human beings - not saints - on the stage.

In Hall’s new Broadway play The Mountaintop, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, Dr. Martin Luther King receives no special treatment. The Reverend King is stripped of his superhero status and portrayed as a man who smoked, drank and was a shameless flirt. He has holes in his socks and his feet smell. One moment he's a grand orator and lecturer; the next he’s chauvinistic and self-assured, at times even acutely paranoid, grave and forsaken.

"It just brings him to life," Hall says, "and brings back the desire to push forward and continue his legacy, and rethink where we are as human beings, where we are as Memphians. He's not a statue."

The provocative play re-imagines the last night of King's life. After he delivered what became his final speech, "I’ve Been to the Mountaintop" on April 3, 1968, King retired to his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He was assassinated the next day on the balcony. 

Hall wondered how King had spent his final night in that room.

Her desire to tell the story was no fluke. Growing up in Memphis, she says, the spirit of King's mission was built into her consciousness, his voice always in her ears and her heart.

Walk into her grandmother's house and you see two portraits on the wall: King and Jesus. Hall became closely familiar with King's speeches in her childhood. Martin Luther King Day was not just a day off from school, but a solemn occasion, a day of remembrance and silence.

Hall sees herself as part of a generation of reapers, gleaning the benefits of the civil rights movement. 

"I grew up at a time when Memphis was changing," she says, "where I would call myself a post-civil-rights baby." Hall had many white friends and had sleepovers with them, but her parents had never stepped inside the house of a white person.

Her inspiration for writing about King's final hours is personal. Hall's mother grew up around the corner from the Lorraine and wanted to see King speak at the Mason Temple that night, but she was only 15, and her mother - Hall's grandmother - refused to let her go because of the danger. Not going was the biggest regret of her mother’s life. 

To honor her mother, Hall wrote her into the play, naming the central character after her, Camae. 

Hall’s first breakthrough came in 2010, when she picked up London's coveted Olivier award. At age 28, she was the first black woman to win the UK's equivalent of the Tony Award for best new play.

In an arena where, as Hall puts it, "American drama is still dominated by white men, dead white men," she's very proud to take a seat at the table. But she's also honest about the challenges and frustrations of being a young, black playwright, yearning to see black life and black women represented on stage. 

"The great white way has been quite exclusive," Hall said, hoping more black female playwrights will follow her example. "It's a testament to change."

Despite the critical acclaim, Hall's play has been met with some controversy. 

"Some people might say this [play] is a desecration to [King's] legacy," Hall said. But she disagrees. "The desecration to his legacy is that we are still sometimes segregated along color lines. That's the desecration to his legacy. Not this play."

By looking back at the moments before King’s life ended, Hall ultimately looks ahead to the present, and deconstructs how far society has gone, and how far it still has to go. She hopes the show is a call to action, a passing of the baton to the next generation. 

"I want them to carry on the fact that we still have so much work to do, and that we all have to be aware, and we all are complicit, and we all can change the world," Hall said. "Ordinary folk, we can do extraordinary things as well. We all can be kings."

By Ron Allen, NBC News Correspondent

CRYSTAL LAKE, Ill. – Nick Sarillo was a carpenter who dreamed of owning a restaurant. So, he built one from the ground up and, of course, called it Nick's.

That was about 16 years ago. It's a warm fun-filled place, with a game room for the kids, lots of stuffed birds and other creatures oddly hanging from the rafters, peanut shells covering the floor, and lots of thin-crust pizza that's actually quite good to eat.

However, these days most customers aren't coming for the food. They are showing up for Nick and his team of about 200 employees. That's because Sarillo was staring foreclosure in the face.

Sarillo is a real go-getter, who expanded his business a few years back when times were good. He hired more people and opened a second restaurant, expecting the community, and its appetite for pizza, to keep growing.

The recession and rampant foreclosures stopped all of that. And it left Sarillo drowning in debt, with a lot of pizza on his hands. 

Sarillo says he did everything possible to keep the ship sailing but ran out of options, except for one.

He wrote an impassioned email to his customers, about 16,000 of them. Basically, he admitted he screwed up, didn't cut back soon enough, didn't have a big enough rainy day fund, didn't anticipate how bad the economy would get.

Finally, he pleaded: "SO MY FINAL REQUEST NOW IS FOR EACH OF YOU TO COME TO NICK'S NOW AND TELL AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE TO COME NOW!" using capital letters and an exclamation point to make sure everyone knew how serious he was.

Well, that email went viral, and touched a lot of hearts. And when you look around the restaurant these days, it looks like most of the folks who got that email, and their friends and neighbors, showed up! 

It certainly didn't hurt that Sarillo had donated thousands and thousands of dollars over the years to just about every local organization you can name, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, local schools, Little League baseball teams… the list and the plaques in Nick's lobby go on and on.

So, to some extent Sarillo was just getting back a lot of what he'd already given. 

That email doubled the number of customers for the week. Sarillo was able to pay his staff, and his bank. Even a little 4-year-old girl named Harper Kenney gave Sarillo five quarters from her piggy bank.

Sarillo says he is safely on the road out of red ink, for now.

Perhaps the moral of the story is: You get back what you give. Make great pizza, and let your customers leave the peanut shells on the floor. 

If you wish to help Nick's, click here.

This is the message Nick Sarillo posted on Facebook, asking for help:

An Uncertain Future:

I have never understood why owners or management of a failing company usually don't give others close to the company-especially customers-fair warning about what is going on. In many instances, the team, the core family that built the business, has showed up to work and found the doors locked. I have always said I would never do that to the people I truly care about and owe my life to.

I realize that posting something like this here on FB is risky and unorthodox, but I don't care because I don't have anything to fear or hide.  We run our business with totally open books, and the core team that shows up to our weekly fiscal huddles will not be surprised by what I'm writing. I truly care about our team and each guest that has blessed us by choosing to eat at Nick's instead of any of the many other places available to them.

As of the beginning of this last week, the hard reality facing us has become glaringly apparent to me. We overbuilt and overspent, and then we didn't cut fast enough or hard enough when sales started to go downhill. The issue is primarily with our Elgin restaurant, but because we are one company, the failure of Elgin will likely impact Crystal Lake as well, depending on the choices our bank makes. This failure is not the fault of our team members; on the contrary, I am extremely grateful to them for their incredible contributions, including accepting salary cuts, taking on more responsibilities, and volunteering to market us on their own time. The whole responsibility for our troubles is mine for making the bad decisions that got us into this mess.

I realize that many of you out there see a busy restaurant and don't understand how we cannot be profitable, or as many of you have expressed, how we could not be "rolling in cash." We do bring in a lot of revenue, but unfortunately that is not enough to cover our mortgage and the other expenses that accrue from having such large facilities. In 2008, sales at our Elgin location began to drop, causing that location to lose money. Fortunately, Crystal Lake was profitable enough to cover both restaurants most of the time. As of this year, that's no longer true. The sales drop in Elgin alone has been 30% since last year and close to 50% since 2007, thanks largely to the bad economy and road construction.

We thought that the opening of a new Walmart across the street from Elgin on October 26th would bring enough new traffic to save that location and our company. Unfortunately, the bills that we have been pushing back this year are catching up with us now, about four weeks short of the finish line.  Barring some sort of miracle, we are going to run out of cash to pay our vendors and team members over the next couple of weeks and will have to close. Believe me, I have already tried everything possible and would not be writing this if the amount we needed was not many thousands of dollars more than I personally could come up with. I really did believe we were going to make it to the finish line and pull through this, but I have nothing left that I can sell, pawn, or promise-just my business, which now is on the table.

I do have one last hope for me and the 200 team members of Nick's.  If within these next four weeks we could see a large increase in sales at either of our restaurants, we could still pull through.  SO MY FINAL REQUEST IS FOR EACH OF YOU TO COME TO NICK'S NOW AND TELL AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE TO COME NOW!  Even if you don't wish to see us survive and continue to be a part of the community, then at least come to say good-bye. If you wish to contact me with investor ideas or any ideas or questions at all, you can email me at office@nickspizzapub.com, call me at 815-356-5557, or simply stop by and talk in person.

Thank you- Nick Sarillo.

By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent

Capt. Matilda Howe is an impressive mix of raw energy and uncanny focus. And she needs to be: she’s the company commander in charge of keeping a key combat aviation brigade in Afghanistan's Logar province in the fight. Whether it’s fuel for her Apache and Chinook helicopter gunships, or drinking water for 4,000 soldiers - every nut, bolt, frozen vegetable, bullet or Hell-Fire missile comes under her watchful eye, as she stays one step ahead of her forward operating base’s needs. The sergeants who have to keep up with her call her "the Energizer Bunny."

But "Mattie," as she likes to be called, has a softer side, too. In her Echo Co. headquarters she anxiously awaits the next mail call and the arrival of the latest crazy nail polish from the States. She calls her 79 soldiers "her children" and knows something about mothering. When Mattie joined the Army at the age of 24 she already had four kids, and signed up on a bet she couldn’t handle the military and her large family. Not only did she thrive in the Army, she also adopted a fifth child. Today, at 36, she’s a grandmother.

"I could never have made it without my mother," she’ll tell you with tears in her eyes. Doris Gardner, herself a 50-something cancer survivor, has taken charge when it’s mattered most, watching over all the kids – her grandkids –  during Mattie’s five overseas deployments. In spite of the distances and long stretches of time away from home, Mattie has tried hard to be a mother to her own. She’s addicted to Skype, calling home at least one, even two hours a night, if possible. She likes to "hang out" with her family, who gather in their living room back in Colorado Springs and chat, via cyberspace. Mattie is also good at sending short video clips she makes from her Flip camera about her life in Afghanistan and her mission there.

Mattie says she draws strength from her family, and those roots go deep – she’s also a full blooded Navajo, the first in her family to leave the reservation back in Jeddito, Ariz.; the first to complete high school and the first to get a college degree.

"In my culture, family is the foundation of life," she says. Sticking together as one gives Capt. Howe the time and space to focus on her demanding job in a war zone. She has no illusions about how dangerous that can be – her unit has lost five pilots since July. But Mattie also gets strength from her tribe, and a special prayer dance performed by her grandfather before she left for Afghanistan often brings her peace, she says.

Mattie Howe is a single mom and a half marathon runner who happens to wear a uniform and defend her country. She never shies away from a challenge – I learned that the hard way when I boasted I’d beat her in a 100-yard dash, back on base. She not only smoked me but left me writhing in pain with a pulled hamstring.

She says she’s just an ordinary Native American who loves her country and wants to give back, but she’s also a tough as nails "lifer" who’s in it for the full 20 years, the first female commander in her brigade. She even dreams of becoming a general some day.

One thing’s for certain – Mattie Howe will never slow down.

Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent who is based in London and covers Afghanistan extensively. You can watch his series "Far From Home" on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and on msnbc.com.