I have just read and am now in the process of re-reading Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, co-authored by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli and published by Crown Business (March 2015). Although at my age the years often seem to pass like months, I find it difficult to believe that it has been almost four years since Jobs died.

What we have in this volume is the co-authors’ attempt to portray him as those who knew him best described him (if not fully explained him) during lengthy and rigorous interviews. The narrative is presented in first-person singular for convenience’s sake but also because Schlender had a relationship with Jobs of almost 25 years.

As I will suggest in my review, this book also offers an alternative to Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography and challenges that biography on several points. The research (especially the interviews) that Schlender and Tetzeli conducted questions, for example, Isaacson’s acceptance of Jobs’s denial of shortchanging partner Steve Wozniak $2,500 on one transaction. The accusation rings true “because it fits with a few other instances in which Steve took shortcuts with people who were close to him.”

I was especially interested in what Tim Cook has to say about Steve Jobs and his relationship with him, especially just before he died when Cook offered to be a liver donor. “No! I’ll never let you do that! I’m not doing that!” He only yelled at Cook four or five times during their thirteen-year relationship “and this was one of them.” What does Cook make of this outburst?

“This picture of him isn’t understood. I thought the Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice…Steve cared. He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him…A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.”

According to Schlender and Tetzeli, dozens of others who were also closely associated with Jobs and knew him best insist that he really was a great human being. They agree with Cook that very little of what has been published offers any sense of why they would have worked so long and so hard for Jobs. “Those former employees share another common thread, too: the idea that they did their very best work of their lives for Steve.”

Read Becoming Steve Jobs and then decide for yourself who he really was. Perhaps I’ll have as different opinion after I re-read it but, for now, I am inclined to think that both biographies have great value but for different reasons. As for the contradictions that Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli, and others discuss, I am unqualified to resolve them.

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, “Steve Jobs was large. He contained multitudes.”