STEVE JOBS

An admiring though not entirely adulatory view of our era’s greatest technology celebrity, rightly dubbed (by U2’s Bono) “the hardware software Elvis.”

Blumenthal weaves her portrait on the thematic frame used by Jobs himself in his autobiographical 2005 Stanford commencement address. She “connects the dots” that led him from his adoption as an infant through his "phone phreaking" days to a spectacular rise and just as meteoric fall from corporate grace in the 1980s. Following a decade of diminished fortunes and largely self-inflicted complications in personal relationships, he returned to Apple for a spectacular second act that also turned out to be his final one. Despite getting bogged down occasionally in detail, the author tells a cohesive tale, infused with dry wit (“He also considered going into politics, but he had never actually voted, which would have been a drawback”). The book is thoroughly researched and clear on the subject’s foibles as well as his genius.

A perceptive, well-wrought picture of an iconic figure well worth admiring—from a distance.