(DPI Book Review) — It’s no news that Steve Jobs was a petulant brat for much of his life:  His mercurial behavior, both in his work and in his personal life, was widely chronicled.  And his personality — controlling, deceptive, hyper-critical, ultra-sensitive — complicated his successes as a technology leader and visionary.  The press alternately hailed and excoriated him.

Thus the question:  Why would Walter Isaacson, biographer of Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein, choose a subject of such shabby character as Jobs? After all, David McCullough, when asked to produce a full-scale biography of Pablo Picasso, decided to pass after learning how dissolute and abusive he was.  You want to write about good people, after all. (McCullough chose Truman instead.)

Isaacson reports that the terminally ill Jobs approached him to write his life story, and, love Steve Jobs or not, it is a fascinating one: Jobs had his ups and downs, to put it gently, and he reaped pretty much everything that he sowed. He was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2004, an affliction that imposed deadlines on both the author and the subject.  In his last years Jobs responded with a remarkable energy and vision for Apple, pushing the company to innovate products and services that have transformed the way we live.  His life was a sharply defined series of chapters; for all Jobs’ faults, his story is one of redemption, at least at the office.

Isaacson and his publisher got the book to the presses only weeks after Jobs died in October 2011. It sold nearly 400,000 copies in the first week, and resided under a million or so Christmas trees a month or so later. “Steve Jobs” was a blockbuster of IPad proportions.

There are not a lot of new insights in this biography: If you followed his company and his life the stories will be familiar.  Moreover, Isaacson is restrained in sweeping judgements, though there is one: Jobs, Isaacson writes at the end, was an “asshole” through a good part of his life. And, though Isaacson never states it definitively, Jobs appears to have been a habitual liar. He comes off as a somewhat delusional salesman — his “reality distortion field” got people to do great things, many argue — and he pretended all ideas were his own. There is an old saying, “There’s no limit to how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Jobs did almost the opposite.  Bill Gates, a frequent counterweight in this narrative, comes off the wiser, more mature and perhaps even the more intelligent leader.

Jobs did mellow a bit, and if he’d lived longer he would have likely become a better man. (I feel certain his stubbornness would have broken down and he’d have met his biological father.) But much of his brilliance gets muddled by his pointlessly cruel and maniacal conduct, means that, even Isaacson suggests, weren’t necessary to achieve his ends. The IPod and the Ipad and ITunes are terrific gadgets and services; was all his abuse necessary to achieve them? That we celebrate and idealize such a man says a lot about our society today. Kids, emulate Steve Jobs at your own risk.

For 500+ pages Isaacson gets the story out, and it’s a story very simply and almost gracefully written – it’s easy for a middle-schooler to pick up. That’s Isaacson’s great accomplishment with “Steve Jobs.”

For much of the narrative Isaacson goes easy on his subject.  It’s not a hagiography, but the author is determined to place Jobs among Edison and Ford, to be remembered, he writes, a century hence.

But all that raises another question: What kind of deal did Isaacson have to strike? Isaacson says he was given almost full access, as well as full control of the narrative, hard to believe given what Isaacson reveals about his subject. It may not matter in any case; former Time editors aren’t confused with the Kitty Kelleys of the world.

Early on Jobs was a devotee of LSD and Eastern Mysticism, two of modern life’s more overrated pursuits. Zen Buddhism may instill a calm and peace in its followers, but it never did in Jobs, who simply used its precepts to psych people out and manipulate them.

Apple today has a market cap of about $500 billion, larger than the respectable GDPs of Poland or Sweden. That, along with all the gadgets and saving the music industry from online thieves, is the legacy of Steve Jobs, of course: It’s the result of his determination, his perfectionism, his relentlessness.  But after reading Isaacson’s book, I’m glad I never met him. — Stephen E. Clark