Right. To some extent, the review is criticizing something Isaacson pretty clearly didn't set out to do—explain technology. Isaacson wants to look at Jobs's contradictions and paradoxes—the kindness and cruelty in a single package, indifference tempered by sudden engagement, a frequently binary worldview, the lack of consistency from the outside, the habits that we'd normally dismiss as bizarre, like dietary ones, that might also be tied to success.

Now, I can understand why someone might not be interested in those things, but to me that doesn't invalidate the book.

BTW, I started it and wrote about the first 50 or so pages here: http://jseliger.com/2011/10/24/the-steve-jobs-biography . Note that the book itself is actually nicely and well-made; it feels like a Jobesian artifact, instead of the usual publishing industry pablum.

I didn't say you shouldn't read it -- I didn't even say I wouldn't finish it myself. I just said why it was painful for me to read it. And why the story is so well-rehearsed, and how the myth has replaced the actual events. So many people are reading so much more into what I wrote than what I actually wrote (and think).

That's it! You figured it out. Give that man a cigar! :)