He Knew He Was Right.

One of the last mysteries of Steve Jobs the man is the existence of Steve Jobs the book: a frank, smart and wholly unsentimental biography by Walter Isaacson, who has also written lives of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. The notoriously private Jobs granted Isaacson more than 40 interviews and exercised none of his usual obsessive control over the result. Control was always Jobs' approach to achieving excellence--Apple's beautiful, hermetically sealed ecosystem of products is the quintessence of control--but in this case he reversed gears, and because of that he got an excellent biography. However, this judgment comes with a disclaimer that belongs outside the customary parentheses: Isaacson was the editor of this magazine from 1996 to 2001, and as such, he was my boss.

Jobs was born in 1955, and the central fact of his childhood was his awareness that he was adopted. It's one of the few solid handholds we have on Jobs' exotic psychology. "He who is abandoned is an abandoner," says an early girlfriend with whom Jobs had a child out of wedlock. Jobs dismissed this theory as "ridiculous," but in fact it's something of a skeleton key to his extraordinary life. Jobs denied paternity of his first child, who was born when Jobs was 23, the same age at which his father had him. Later on, Isaacson convincingly casts former Apple president John Sculley as a father figure whom Jobs passionately courted, then vengefully abandoned.

We forget now how early and how spectacularly Jobs succeeded--when Apple went public in 1980, Jobs netted $256 million--and also how thoroughly he failed. After the Apple II in 1977, he essentially went 18 years without shipping a successful product; even the revolutionary Macintosh was a money loser, rapidly annihilated by Windows. It was Buzz Lightyear who saved Jobs' career: after eating money for a decade, Pixar finally produced Toy Story in 1995. It took in $30 million on its first weekend, and a week later Pixar went public. Jobs' shares were worth $1.2 billion.

For all the time that Isaacson spent in Jobs' famous reality-distortion field, he has emerged with a remarkably sharp, high-res portrait, one that anyone who knew Jobs, as I did, will recognize. It's not always a pretty picture: there have been any number of glowing, hagiographical eulogies for Jobs, but Isaacson comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him. Jobs was a genius and a visionary, but he was also manipulative of and abusive to his colleagues. He cried when scolded or thwarted. As a father and a romantic partner he could be withholding--that he wound up in a working marriage is as much a miracle as his resuscitation of Apple. (Jobs' widow Laurene Powell is the one person in the book with whom Isaacson is openly smitten.)