Insanely great

Steve Jobs. By Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster; 630 pages; $35. Little, Brown; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

REMOVING the sleeve reveals a book that is entirely white, except for the names of its author and subject in elegant black type on the spine. It is the perfect design for the biography of a man who insisted that even the innards of his products be exquisitely crafted, and that his factory walls gleam in the whitest white.

The cover was the only part of the book Steve Jobs wanted to control, writes Walter Isaacson in his introduction. The rest of his long-awaited tome bears this out. Though Mr Jobs pushed the biographer of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin to pen his own, granting him more than 40 interviews, this book offers a refreshing counterbalance to the adulation that followed his death on October 5th at the age of 56.

The picture Mr Isaacson paints, particularly in the first half of this book, is not flattering. Mr Jobs emerges as a controlling and often unsympathetic character. A child of the 1960s counterculture, he abhorred materialism and lived in simply furnished houses (in part because he was too picky to decide on furniture). But when Apple went public in 1980, he refused to give any stock options to Daniel Kottke, a longtime supporter and soul mate from college. “He has to abandon the people he is close to,” observes Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple engineer. Mr Isaacson finds meaning in the fact that Mr Jobs was adopted, but this excuse feels thin.

Mr Jobs was disarmingly charismatic, employing what has been dubbed a “reality distortion field” to inspire cult-like loyalty. But also he could be cold and cruel. If he disapproved of an employee's work, he often humiliated him. “This is who I am,” he once said after being challenged, “and you can't expect me to be someone I'm not.” This nasty edge wasn't always helpful, but it served a purpose, writes Mr Isaacson: many would “end their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible.”

Often eccentric, Mr Jobs developed obsessive dietary habits in his early 20s, along with a taste for Bob Dylan, LSD and Zen. At Reed College in Portland before he dropped out, he ate only fruits and vegetables, if anything. When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2003, he refused surgery for months, opting for alternative treatment including a strict vegan diet.

Whereas Mr Jobs might have thrown one of his tantrums after reading the first half of the book (which he never saw), he would have enjoyed the second. It describes the period following his return to Apple in 1996, more than 11 years after he was pushed out. He had become a more mature manager, if not quite a mellow one, after running, with mixed success, Pixar, a film studio, and NeXT, a computer maker. He quickly turned the nearly bankrupt Apple around and made it into the world's most valuable technology company.

Much has been written about how he pulled this off. Mr Isaacson offers new perspectives. Mr Jobs was not simply a brilliant albeit quasi-autistic innovator, nor was his firm a one-man show. He readily—sometimes too readily—took on ideas from others and recruited great talent, not least Tim Cook, Apple's new boss, who made the firm's operations into one of the industry's most efficient.

More interesting is Mr Isaacson's description of how Mr Jobs engineered a different kind of technology company: one that could develop tightly integrated packages of hardware and software. This meant departments had to work together. At most companies engineering drives design; Apple does it the other way around. Together with Jonathan Ive, the firm's chief designer, Mr Jobs would decide on how a product should look and feel, and the engineers had to make it happen.

The book's flaws are a result of its rush to print (publication was expedited when Mr Jobs's health was failing). But despite being repetitive and long-winded, it is worth the read. Mr Isaacson has achieved what Mr Jobs wanted: an account for his four children of what their father did and why. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy,” observes Laurene Powell, his wife of 20 years, “but he also has a remarkable story.”