The resurrection of a business legend
So this is the book that Steve Jobs wanted to ban. Heaven only knows why.
Jobs was supposedly so outraged by its contents that he ordered Apple's retail stores to stop selling all titles issued by John Wiley & Sons Inc., the publisher.
So what's up with this childish snit? A backhanded way of stirring up book sales, or a genuine reflection of Jobs's notorious arrogance? Either way, ''iCon" seems scarcely worth the bother. It's your typical corporate bigwig biography -- admiring but not fawning, critical but not merciless, informative but not especially revealing.
You can't fault the authors for their choice of subject. The resurrection of Steve Jobs surely ranks among the most remarkable comeback stories of our time. Here's a guy who'd become a business legend before his 30th birthday, only to be brutally ousted from the leadership of Apple Computer Inc., the company he'd cofounded.
Cast into the wilderness, Jobs spent the next decade pouring his dwindling fortune into a pair of long-shot ventures that put him back on top in ways no one could have predicted.
One of those ventures was Pixar, a computer animation shop once owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas, who sold it to Jobs for a song to pay for a messy divorce. The other was NeXT, a firm founded by Jobs to produce an advanced computer.
Today, Pixar is the world's leading maker of animated films, a movie studio so powerful that Jobs recently cut off talks to renew its contract with partner Walt Disney Co. As for NeXT, the name may be forgotten, but the software became the basis for the operating system that drives today's Apple Macintosh computers.
In 1996, a crippled Apple came crawling to Jobs for the software. Jobs sold it to Apple, for $377 million and an appointment as ''special adviser" to the company that had exiled him. Jobs's advice was simple enough -- replace competent but colorless chief executive Gil Amelio with himself. Without a qualm, he dry-gulched Amelio and seized control.
Disloyal, perhaps, but customers, employees, and shareholders don't care. The new, improved Jobs is easily among the two or three best business leaders in America. Yet there's little drama in Jeffrey Young's and William Simon's telling of the tale. Jobs's refusal to cooperate with the authors doesn't help, and the writers never find some other way of reaching into the mind of their subject.
The book skips lightly over crucial aspects of Jobs's career that would have repaid closer inspection. For instance, we get very little detail on his campaign to resurrect Apple's fortunes.
On the other hand, more recent events get more thorough treatment. There's good stuff here about the rise of Pixar, with full credit given to the real creative geniuses at the studio, directors John Lasseter and Brad Bird. Along the way, we get an entertaining look at the savage infighting at Walt Disney. Young and Simon also do well in relating the rise of the iTunes music software and iPod music player.
Still, ''iCon" fails as biography. Maybe that's the real reason that Jobs, perfectionist that he is, won't let it be sold in his company's stores. It's not good enough.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 
