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.
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