In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Isaacson provides a no-holds-barred account of Jobs' professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography aims to be the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
Reviews
The Los Angeles Times
Richard Rayner
"It's great stuff, and the communicated thrill of work and invention brings "Steve Jobs" to life. Sometimes, as when Bono twitters on about the birth of the snazzy black U2 iPod, pages descend into drooling celeb-chat. Generally, though, Isaacson sidesteps that sinkhole, and if what the reader gets feels like oral history as much as considered biographical judgment, that's actually all to the good ... Its very unmediated quality turns it almost into original source."
28/10/2011
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The Mail on Sunday
Toby Young
"The figure who emerges is a ferociously driven technologist whose business savvy and marketing flair revolutionised six industries … Yet he was also a thoroughly unpleasant human being … Could he have achieved all this without being quite such a cruel, arrogant man? The answer, says Isaacson in this richly entertaining biography, is no. Jobs was a ruthless entrepreneur who trampled over business rivals in his climb to the top. 'Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher's concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Uberman came naturally to him,' he writes."
30/10/2011
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The Sunday Telegraph
Tim Martin
"Eyewateringly frank … Isaacson organises his material well and writes with a pacy, demotic style, though the speed with which this book was rushed out after Jobs’s death is occasionally noticeable at the copy-editing level … Taken as a whole, though, this is a riveting book, with as much to say about the transformation of modern life in the information age as about its supernaturally gifted and driven subject"
30/10/2011
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The Times
Murad Ahmed
"It is not perfect. We hear little, for example, about how the iPad came into being. But there’s enough — more than enough — to satisfy devoted Apple enthusiasts and those seeking a thrilling read ... Jobs comes across as an epic character in the mould of Tony, the mafia don from the The Sopranos — compelling and charismatic, yet cruel and destructive. There is no shortage of material here for a great movie adaptation."
24/10/2011
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The Evening Standard
Mark Pagel
"The book is packed with remarkable anecdotes about Jobs's family — for instance, his long-lost sister, Mona Jobs, was actually the inspiration for Homer Simpson's mother (who shares her name) in the TV show The Simpsons. Most intriguing is his aloof and strange relationship with his four children, and it is absolutely fascinating to see him put Apple before even his own family ... Isaacson is a man who clearly "gets" Jobs, and has provided a fitting legacy to a flawed genius."
03/11/2011
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The New Statesman
Helen Lewis-Hasteley
"[It] sometimes feels less "warts-and-all" and more "all-warts" ... The triumph of this biography, however, is that Jobs's mountain of peccadilloes is weighted perfectly against his undeniable triumphs. Isaacson makes a convincing case that he was an artistic visionary with pure motives, driven only by a love of "the product"."
05/11/2011
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The Spectator
Andrew Rosenheim
"Faced with portraying an almost uniquely successful monster, Isaacson has done an outstanding job. He keeps a sturdily detached perspective about Jobs’ many eccentricities — an aversion to bathing, weird diets — and about a personality that combined lack of empathy with a penchant for bullying abuse. It’s unnecessary in any case for Isaacson to act as hanging judge; Jobs was so indifferent to what people thought of him that he brought his own rope to court."
05/11/2011
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The Sunday Times
Bryan Appleyard
"Like the [iPhone 4S], the book is not quite as stuffed full of new goodies as rumour suggested … But the point about these revelations is not that they are uninteresting, it is that they are predictable. If you read the Apple blogs and previous books about Jobs for any length of time, if you use his eerily beautiful machines, Steve will be as familiar to you as that mad uncle who turns up every few weeks with a new bee in his bonnet ... But, in spite of all that, a more intensified version of Jobs does emerge from these pages and Isaacson’s ultimate judgments are sound."
30/10/2011
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The Observer
Peter Conrad
"Incisive … The biography is honest and therefore often harsh, but it confers on Jobs a kind of tragic desperation when, with the onset of cancer, he discovers that his infinitely looped and ingenious mind is housed in a fallible body … Isaacson laments Jobs's infantile tantrums, while recognising that this childishness — exemplified by his Pixar blockbuster Toy Story — turned his products from tools into delightfully frisky playthings."
30/10/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Matt Warman
"… not the uncritical hagiography that many might expect … It’s the sense of relentlessness about Steve Jobs’ ambition, expressed through iPods, iPads and iPhones, that comes through Isaacson’s book."
24/10/2011
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The Financial Times
Richard Waters
"To read this book is to feel the subtle influence of Jobs the master manipulator reaching out from beyond the grave … But Isaacson, a calm and balanced reporter, is generally up to the task of exposing the revisionism."
28/10/2011
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The Guardian
Sam Leith
"Isaacson writes dutiful, lumbering American news-mag journalese and suffers — as did Jobs himself — from a lack of sense of proportion. Chapter headings evoke Icarus and Prometheus. The one on the Apple II is subtitled "Dawn of a New Age", the one on Jobs's return to Apple is called "The Second Coming" ... But get past all that pomp and there's much to enjoy."
29/10/2011
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The New York Times
Janet Maslin
"[The biography] greatly admires its subject. But its most adulatory passages are not about people. Offering a combination of tech criticism and promotional hype, Mr. Isaacson describes the arrival of each new product right down to Mr. Jobs’s theatrical introductions and the advertising campaigns. But if the individual bits of hoopla seem excessive, their cumulative effect is staggering."
21/10/2011
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