Ken's Reviews > Steve Jobs

Well, a lot of the early stuff I was already familiar with through Wozniak's book "iWoz" and Hertzfeld's book "Revolution in the Valley", and a lot of the later stuff was familiar from press accounts. But it is great to have the whole arc of Steve's life in one single volume. And there are a great many details that I was not familiar with.

The book is well-written and easy to read, but it does seem rushed a bit, particularly toward the end. As has been noted elsewhere, the early part of the book is very detailed, and those details appear to be quoted verbatim from "iWoz" and "Revolution in the Valley". It's unfortunate that Jobs's later years don't get nearly as detailed treatment. The later years focus mainly on Jobs's life, and not so much on Apple the company or the broader story of Job's and Apple's influence on the tech industry.

So, it's true that this biography is not as comprehensive as something that you might find from someone like Robert Caro (one of my favorite biographical authors). It tells well the story we already knew (the Macintosh) and it skims over a lot of the story we didn't know much about (NeXT and the 2nd term at Apple). It would be a much stronger book if Isaacson had done more original research about this period of time. This explains why a lot of people in the tech industry are disappointed in the book.

But it is a good general account of the man's life, for a general audience.