Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster, 656 pages,
$35

Writing a biography of a modern public figure is harder than
writing a novel. While an artist can create or abstract a narrative
theme that ties all his facts together, real lives are full of
distractions, narrative dead ends, inexplicable incidents,
coincidences, and contradictions.

So it’s no surprise that Walter Isaacson’s new biography of
Apple founder and serial business inventor Steve Jobs, rushed into
print less than a month after Jobs’ death on October 5, is
ultimately disappointing. Jobs is as much a mystery on the last
page as he is on the first. Even those who loved or hated him the
most can’t quite make up their minds about him; Isaacson makes sure
to let us know that Jobs’ friends and family consistently
acknowledged his flaws, while his opponents (Bill Gates leaps to
mind) felt compelled to praise his consistent pattern of
game-changing business invention.

I keep adding the word business before
invention because Jobs was not, for the most part, a
technically proficient man. Early in Isaacson’s book, we witness
Jobs finishing assembly work on the motherboards of the first Apple
computers. It is the last time we see him playing a hands-on role
in making something electronic. He wasn’t an inventor, but he was
no mere businessman either; we don’t exactly have a word for what
Steve Jobs was, and Isaacson is as much at a loss as the rest of
us. How do you describe a man who is responsible for the fact that
the MacBook Air I am typing on right now is completely silent?
There are no fans in Apple II computers or early Macs. Why? Because
Jobs thought they were noisy, unpleasant distractions, even though
without fans computers tend to overheat.

This isn’t to say that Walter Isaac-son, a veteran journalist
whose biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry
Kissinger, and others have been consistently praised for their care
and scholarship, skimped on Steve Jobs. He gets a lot of
things right, most notably the irrelevance of Jobs’ lack of
technical chops. What did matter was the entrepreneur’s insistent
drive to make better things—not just a computer “for the rest of
us,” but also a music player, a phone, a personal digital
all-purpose tool. Jobs didn’t invent any of these devices; he just
shepherded the invention of the versions you might want to own.
Henry Ford, after all, didn’t invent the automobile; what he did
was put an affordable, usable car into millions of driveways and
garages.

Jobs had something like Ford’s gift for seeing a consumer market
where one never existed before. He looked at Steve Wozniak’s
hobbyist computer circuit board design and saw something that
everybody might want. Provided, of course, that it came prepackaged
and looked elegant on your desk.

The story of a genius who sees the future when other people just
see a hobby or (worse) a desk full of disassembled parts would be a
good story to tell, but that’s not quite Jobs either. Isaac-son, to
his credit, doesn’t simplify him that way. For one thing, the
super-genius story line does not account for the fact that, for
much of his life, Jobs was an obsessive, narcissistic, frequently
sociopathic nutcase. This observation must have been the hardest
part of Steve Jobs for Isaacson to write; he confesses
early on that Jobs had the gift of making you think you were the
most important person in the room—until he turned and started
calling you the stupidest.

The book is peppered—over-seasoned, really—with evidence of
Jobs’ casual cruelty. This exchange from Apple’s early days is just
one example. Mike Scott, then the company’s president, recalls
taking a walk with Jobs and telling him to bathe more often. “He
said that in exchange I had to read his fruitarian diet book,”
Scott says, “and consider it as a way to lose weight.” Scott stayed
fat and Jobs “made only minor modifications to his hygiene,”
maintaining that bathing was unnecessary for fruitarians. Dietary
obsessions and alternative health regimes were to remain a theme
throughout Jobs’ life, and Isaacson is not too shy to hint that
perhaps this long-term rejection of Western medicine hastened his
death.

Born in 1955, Jobs arrived just slightly too late for the 1960s
counterculture, but he scrambled to make up for it with primal
scream therapy, a pilgrimage to India, unembarrassed Dylan and
Beatles fanboyism, and countless LSD trips. He was an explorer,
looking for meaning, and he chose ultimately to build tools that
empowered his restless fellow man.

Yet nothing really explains, let alone justifies, the fact that
Jobs was so often an unrelenting jerk. I’m about as big a Steve
Jobs fan as anyone, but I cannot read about his almost total
abandonment of his first child, Lisa—complete with a ridiculous
denial of his indubitable paternity—without wanting to slap his
corpse. (Jobs eventually took responsibility for Lisa. Without
acknowledging a connection, he also named one of his iconic
computers after her. But Isaacson edges toward the conclusion that
Lisa remained profoundly hurt by that early rejection.)

Longtime friend and confidant Andy Hertzfeld is ready to forgive
even this, due to the fact that Jobs was adopted: “That goes back
to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the
theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.” It’s a nicely glib
explanation, but Jobs himself didn’t buy it. “Knowing I was adopted
may have made me feel more independent,” he told Isaacson, “but I
have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My parents
made me feel special.” 

Even if the adoption really was some kind of foundational
trauma, what explains Jobs’ well-known, needless cruelty to perfect
strangers? Consider his treatment of an early Apple job applicant.
“How old were you when you lost your virginity?” Jobs asked. The
candidate looked baffled. “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. Hertzfeld
recalls “the poor guy was turning varying shades of red.”

If Jobs had left the pages of computing history right then, when
Apple was a fraction the size of Hewlett-Packard or IBM, he
wouldn’t have been much more than a footnote, or perhaps an object
lesson in a chapter titled “What Not to Do.” But Jobs seemed
determined to disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are
no second acts in American lives. 

Here is a short list of Jobs’ contributions to computing and
consumer electronics: 1) the computer you could buy and didn’t have
to assemble with a soldering iron, 2) the affordable personal
computer with a graphic user interface, 3) personal computers that
were fun to touch, 4) consumer electronics that looked and felt
beautiful, 5) wireless networking, 6) the mouse, the track pad, and
the touch screen, 7) a thousand songs in your pocket, 8) a tablet
computer that you actually want to operate with your fingertip, and
9) a phone that is also a camera and a music player. 

Once again, Jobs didn’t invent any of these innovations; he just
produced the versions that you wanted to put your hands on, that
you wanted to own. (Wait, did I forget Pixar? Right, the guy
revolutionized film animation too. It feels oddly like an
afterthought.)