I wonder how Steve Jobs and Walter Isaacson, his chosen biographer, will get on?
Jobs is authoritarian, belligerent, secretive, vindictive--and original. Isaacson, who once ran Time magazine and CNN, is a deft politician, a smooth agent, an eager-to-please social animal whose work has always been proficient and commercial, but which has never broken new ground.
Jobs is the ultimate entrepreneur, Isaacson a devoted company man.
Jobs has resisted telling his story, indeed, has famously found himself at odds with almost every journalist who has covered him and his company with anything much more critical than a hagiographic point of view.
Isaacson is not a mere journalist, rather he's assiduously climbed to the level of his subjects. Now the director of the Aspen Institute, a social network of the elite, he has even seen himself as a possible Secretary of State.
Isaacson's two recent books--about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein--are august profiles of the type that Jobs would surely like to have for himself. His earlier book about Henry Kissinger, when Kissinger was still on his game, is of a different sort. Isaacson deftly slices Henry up. The Apple people, if they have done their homework (which, if it involves reading books, they probably haven't), might well dismiss Isaacson's Kissinger as a youthful book, and consider the more decorous Franklin and Einstein as mature works.
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