A bracingly personal look at our era’s key innovator
It seems strangely fitting that you can now listen to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on one of the latter’s inventions. It’s a powerful reminder of the ubiquity of the man whom Isaacson boldly proclaims an American innovator of the caliber of Thomas Edison. What comes across most clearly in Steve Jobs isn’t that Jobs invented any one particular gadget, but rather the way he raised existing ideas to perfection, making products people rushed to with a religious fervor.

Isaacson, who conducted countless interviews with Jobs and his immense network of rich, powerful and incredibly smart friends and lovers, offers us an unprecedentedly close portrait of the man. He starts from the very beginning, with strong portraits of Jobs’s biological parents as well as the adoptive ones who took him in after he was abandoned. He follows Jobs through adolescence, eventually offering a fresh take on the now-familiar saga of his fall from grace with Apple. Some of the most revealing stretches in this book come in the final act, where Isaacson charts out Jobs’ personal and private life as he helmed Pixar, NeXT, and, ultimately, took Apple to the top of the world’s corporate entities.

The book is a treasure trove of Jobs’s mantra-like sayings (“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”) as well as revealing stories, like the 67 nurses Jobs ran through while being treated for cancer until he found the perfect ones, and the oxygen mask he rips off because it was poorly designed. Although Isaacson doesn’t cover up what a difficult and demeaning person Jobs could be, this is clearly a sympathetic portrait meant to enshrine Jobs more than deconstruct him. That’s fine for a first draft of history, as there will surely be scores of books to offer the critical opinions that Isaacson largely eschews in favor of showing us the man behind the technology virtually all of us are now hooked on.