'Steve Jobs:' A review of the Apple co-founder's biography
01.01.70
Simon & Schuster, 630 pp., $35
By Kevin Coughlin
With those steely, Zen-master eyes, the Apple co-founder stares up at me from the jacket of "Steve Jobs." I feel the trepidation related by virtually everyone interviewed in Walter Isaacson’s exhaustively researched biography. Such is the power of Jobs’ legendary "reality distortion field" that he still imposes his will, from beyond the grave.
Cancer took Jobs last month before he could read the best-seller he had authorized. Based on his binary — some would say bipolar — worldview, there’s a 50-50 chance his critique would have been a reflexive, "This is s---!"
It’s not.
Isaacson has pulled off a neat trick, refusing to sugarcoat or simplify one of the most complex, brilliant and frustrating figures in American cultural lore.
Jobs gets his proper due for transforming how we communicate. "History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors," writes Isaacson, a biographer of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin who was recruited by Jobs so that his children might understand why he spent so little time with them.
Source: The Star-Ledger - NJ.com (blog)