The Achievement of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs

   I just finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson on my Kindle. It is an excellent book about a remarkably interesting, inventive and, to use too mild a word, quirky person, who propelled Apple (of which in 1976 he was a cofounder) to become the first US company to be valued at over seven hundred billion dollars,¹ a distinctions that was merely a byproduct of Jobs’ creativity in the conception and design of Apple products and his leadership of the complex process that brought them into being.

   Read the book: it is a fascinating and complex tale. Here I am not about to write a review of it; rather, I want to provide a glimpse of what went into this complex narrative.² Surely Isaacson found doing a biography of Einstein much” simpler,” given a huge literature to lean on and filch from. Jobs requested Isaacson to write his biography and indeed cooperated fully with him without seeking any control over the book’s content. While he said that at some point he would read it, he almost surely did not before he died, just days before the official date of the book’s publication.

    Cooperation meant, above all, that Jobs would give him interviews; it turned out there were more than forty of them in the course of two years. But clearly, for those encounters to be truly useful for the book, its author could not have been a passive listener who depended on his interlocutor to be consistently revealing and to the point and neither ramble not push theses that “merely” showed him in a good light. Isaacson had to know what questions to ask what needed a prompt for further information, and much more. And that "executive" role of the author calls for famirity with an enterprise concerning which there was surely not a neat record to take home to be digested. (Compare that with the huge literature about Einstein, his scientific colleagues, etc., etc. that existed before Isaacson’s new biography was even begun.) In short, for those Jobs interviews to be fruitful, a heroic operation bootstrap was required.

   In effect, Isaacson had to become a historian of Apple in order to be a successful biographer of Jobs. A good example both of what is involved in this, as well as an indication of the details (never boring) revealed by the book, is the list of “characters” set down at the outset, together with a phrase or paragraph identifying each. There are 72 of them (if I counted correctly), with the majority of them people most readers and certainly not I had never heard of before encountering them here. But there is more. In an appendix entitled “Sources” Isaacson lists the people whom he interviewed (between 2009 and 2011) as he was working on the manuscript: I counted 119  “respondents,” as the lingo has it, a list that includes Jobs but also a good many who are not themselves a part of the story. There is also a list of written sources and there are notes for each of the book’s 42 chapters. 

   What makes Steve Jobs so interesting is not only the sympathetic yet emphatically frank account of the man on the title page, but its presentation, in fascinating detail, of the history of a remarkable company. Isaacson should be congratulated for gathering and harnessing an immense amount of material and of imposing an order on it—or, perhaps better, extracting that order from it—and finally of shaping it into a coherent and interesting narrative. As I said at the outset: go read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

¹Substantially more than the next two: Exxon Mobil and Berkshire Hathaway.

²I am not well read in biographical—or any other—literature, so it may be that the complexity I want to point to is not all that unusual. So be it.