What’s your opinion of author Walter Isaacson? I’ve got both his Steve Jobs and Elon Musk books on hold at the library, but it’s gonna be a long wait, especially for the Musk work.
I come into this a hater of Elon and neutral to positive for Steve Jobs.
I notice he’s also written about Einstein and Leonardo, I’d be interested in exploring those if I like what I read.
Isaacson is one of my favorite authors. (I read a lot, mostly non-fiction.)
I love the Einstein book. He confirms one of my favorite stories (from Bennett Cerf), that Albert (in Princeton) was visited daily by a grade-school girl, whose bemused parents were told what they talked about: “She brings me cookies, and I do her arithmetic homework.” The real story is even better: he doesn’t do the work but teaches her how to do it.
I also love the Steve Jobs book. It reminded me of how people once thought computers could only be operated by “brainiacs”. But Jobs eventually convinced the world that high-tech devices could become consumer electronics. That is genius, when people don’t remember what it was like before you. (Unlike Einstein, Jobs was an asshole).
Enjoy!
My lovely wife is sitting beside me reading his Einstein at this very instant, and quite enjoying it.
I really liked his biographies of Einstein and Steve Jobs. I also thought his book on CRISPR and Jennifer Doudna (The Code Breaker) was excellent, as was his book on IT (The Innovators).
But despite my admiration of him as a writer, I can’t bring myself to read his new biography of Elon Mask, I hate that guy so much for what he did to Twitter.
Isaacson is a great biographer and is (or maybe I should say “was”) one of my favourite non-fiction authors. I’ve read the Steve Jobs bio (the one I think I enjoyed the most) The Innovators, and a few others. As for the Elon Musk bio, it’s been sitting on my Kindle for months and I can’t seem to get around to it, in large part because of the impression that Isaacson became a Musk fanboy. Isaacson’s reversal of his published account of Musk turning off Starlink access during Ukraine’s attack on Crimea was absolutely shameful, and in my opinion greatly undermined his credibility as an impartial biographer.
FTR, my #1 top non-fiction writer is Erik Larson. The Devil in the White City is probably his most intricate and accomplished work, but I also loved In the Garden of Beasts, Isaac’s Storm, Dead Wake, and Thunderstruck.
Isaacson convinced me that Musk is far more consequential than Jobs, bringing us electric cars much sooner (not that I can put a number of years on that “much”).
However, engineering graduates, with other options, would have to be insane or masochistic to take a job working for a Musk company after reading the book. I wonder if Isaacson has caused major hiring problems at Tesla and SpaceX.
I’ve only read his Einstein book, which I liked because I’m always interested in Einstein and also because he mentions me in one of the footnotes (with an error).
“There is no such thing as bad publicity.” 