The Isaacson bio

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs almost literally has become an overnight success. Much of the credit, morbidly enough, has to be given posthumously to Jobs himself: the timing of his death could not have been more fortuitous, from the standpoint of publisher Simon & Schuster.

Amid the largely flattering reviews, including Janet Maslin's for the New York Times, it was refreshing to read Joe Nocera's opinion piece. Nocera was moved to write about his own reaction to the book because he was puzzled: "I was trying to figure out why 'Steve Jobs,' despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold." Nocera concluded that Isaacson simply was too close to Jobs to have the requisite historical perspective for a truly compelling biography.

I haven't read Isaacson's book, and I suspect it will be a long time before I do, if, indeed, I ever bother. (Simon & Schuster may well find that its extensive publicity blitz for the book has backfired among people like me, who believe we've heard or read about all that is worth hearing or reading from Jobs' biography already.) I'll hazard a guess, though, that Nocera is right about Isaacson's lack of perspective -- which, let me add, was all but inevitable given his extensive interaction with Jobs, and should not be held against him as some sort of personal failing.

Isaacson's book may find itself playing the same role vis-à-vis Jobs as James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson plays with respect to Johnson. Boswell's work was considered for a long time to be the last word on Johnson; eventually, though, it became merely another source for more nuanced, more thoroughly researched, and more accurate biographies. It hardly seems possible that Isaacson could have conducted the kind of research necessary to gain a balanced insight on his subject in only two years, but his biography (and perhaps more importantly, the forty-odd interviews he conducted with Jobs himself) will be an important, perhaps a uniquely important, resource for future biographers.