Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography

by Karen Blumenthal

few sources are worth an extra mention: In the early 1980s, journalist Michael Moritz had access to Jobs, Jobs’s family, and friends in reporting a book on Apple’s founding—until Moritz contributed some reporting to Time magazine. After the story was juiced up by a New York editor and became “The Updated Book of Jobs,” Jobs cut Moritz off, but the story and his book, The Little Kingdom, are rich with detailed reporting about Jobs’s early life. Virtually every book or article about Jobs’s early years builds on Moritz’s original reporting. A lengthy interview with Playboy and a Smithsonian oral history, both available online, fill in many of the remaining pieces of what we know about Jobs’s childhood, teen, and college years. In 2009, Walter Isaacson, a noted biographer and former editor of Time, began an authorized biography of Jobs. The two met some forty times over two years, and Isaacson also interviewed dozens of Jobs’s friends, family members, and coworkers, giving him extraordinary insight into his subject. His five-hundred-plus-page biography, Steve Jobs, is worth reading for ambitious readers who want the most detailed account of this unusual and remarkable life. Beyond the books, a few journalists covered Jobs for many years. Brent Schlender, a former Wall Street Journal colleague