‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ meets Apple brass’ approval

Sure, there’s already been a bestselling, authorized biography of Steve Jobs: “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson. But it’s not the best biography, according to Apple brass.

Tim Cook and other company executives are throwing their support behind “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, which is being published Tuesday by Crown Business.

“I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice,” Tim Cook says in Fast Company, in an adapted excerpt from Schlender and Tetzeli’s book. “It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time.”

Tetzeli is executive editor of Fast Company. Schlender has covered technology for more than two decades for the Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine.

“‘Becoming Steve Jobs’ is, at heart, Schlender’s story, the story of a journalist’s 25-year relationship with a source,” Fortune writes. “[I]t’s through Schlender’s stories, freshly told, often from taped interviews, that we get to know Steve Jobs as Schlender knew him.... Jobs cultivated Schlender, gave him long interviews, called him to gossip and complain.”

The New York Times reports that Eddy Cue, Apple’s chief of software and Internet services, took to Twitter to support “Becoming Steve Jobs,” and that in a New Yorker profile, design chief Jony Ive said he’d only read parts of Isaacson’s book but, “My regard couldn’t be any lower.”

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