It isn’t surprising that the backlash against Steve Jobs is underway, given the nearly volcanic hype about him, his life, and the very excellent biography of him by Walter Isaacson, which I finished yesterday. Bloggers and journalists are clobbering Jobs online as a nasty, ego-centric maniac. But it’s a gripping book, all two pounds of it, and I could not put it down. Jobs life and times seem very personal to me, as a life-long Apple computer user, and a writer and photographer whose works was shaped as much by Apple products and software as anything. Jobs designed the company for people like me in many ways. I needed technology, but didn’t need to know how to use it. So I never did.

Getting an Apple when I became a writer was something of a political statement, a creative expression of individuality in a Microsoft-Wal-Mart world. I didn’t have to worry about the technology inside my Mac, something Jobs did for me. Lately, I have become more aware of the underside of that choice, as I am ever more dependent on Apple as the number of cool things in my cabled life grow – photos, videos, words, songs, blogs, pings. Apple is becoming a cradle-to-grave experience, tech wise – Jobs built a company that controls every single part of the consumer experience and they have a lot of my money – and sometimes I feel as if I am trapped inside that very cool fruit. If the company goes sour, I am really screwed.

I thought the book was wonderful, if a bit stiff and formal at times.  Isaacson is from the journalism establishment, not Silicon Valley, and it does show. But that’s a quibble. The book is very readable, fair, thorough and quite powerful. Jobs was an amazing man, as messed up as he was brilliant, as awful to the people around him as he was an advocate for the people who bought his neat and far-sighted products. Jobs didn’t follow the creative impulses of people like me, he created them. When I go on book tour, the first thing I stuff into the suitcase is my MacBook Pro, my Ipad2, my Iphone and the attendant cables. And I use them all. My work life occurs within the ICloud and when my ATT  contract runs out, I will get to know Siri, the new personal assistant.

I thought Job’s life was fascinating and quite wrenchingly sad. He worked hard for a spiritual life but never seemed to find one. He was almost sociopathically cruel to the people around him and thoughtless of them. He had a brilliant vision for technology and its potential intersection with humanity. He was a ferocious advocate for the consumers of his products. He was uncompromisingly committed to quality and design and he demanded the best of everyone around him. He built a company that seems nearly unique in its risk-taking, creativity and disdain for market research and timidity – the hallmarks of modern corporatism.  Almost every good thing he did was in spite of journalists, boards of directors, and fellow CEO’s, who predicted failure at every turn, and never seemed to notice that it wasn’t happening. Jobs  was the anti-Microsoft, the biological opposite of Wal-Mart or Bank Of America.

Job’s illness and death – meticulously chronicled by Isaacson – speak powerfully to the false promise and confusion of the medical system, and the almost medieval suffering it inflicts in the name of health and progress. Jobs seemed to succumb to that false promise, even though a part of him knew better.  When it came to health, he knew better than to trust too much in technology, even as worshipped technology and personal expression and creativity. His decision to avoid conventional medicine and cancer surgery is presented in the book as a monumental mistake, but I have to say I didn’t read it that way, not after following his long and tortuous journey. I think he had it right the first time.

Should you buy and read the book, in my opinion? Absolutely. It’s an extraordinarily tale, to me a brutal indictment of most contemporary corporate thinking. Instead of asking why nobody else is doing anything like Jobs or his company, our  tepid and profit-obsessed business and media culture seems content to  gush over somebody almost none of them would have hired, emulated or emulated. Jobs with all of his grievous warts will be remembered long after almost all of them are gone.