He Knew He Was Right.

The strange, sad, triumphant life of Steve Jobs

Marco Grob for TIME

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...

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