‘Becoming Steve Jobs,’ by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
In early 2009, Tim Cook presented Steve Jobs, his cancer-stricken mentor and friend, with a surprise offer: Cook wanted to donate a portion of his own liver to his ailing boss, who was stuck in dangerous limbo on California’s waiting list for liver transplants.
Cook had researched the surgical procedure known as a living-donor transplant, even traveling to visit hospitals outside the San Francisco Bay Area to avoid media attention. He apparently concluded that his blood type was the same as Jobs’s and that the operation was safe (the donor’s remaining liver and the portion transplanted to the recipient each grow to a functional size). But Jobs immediately shot down the stunningly generous proposal. “No,” a bedridden Jobs angrily replied, according to Cook’s recollections in “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader,” by the journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. “I’ll never let you do that.”
That moving anecdote is one of several that will quicken the pulse of even obsessive Apple watchers. “Becoming Steve Jobs” enters a crowded body of work devoted to Apple and its idiosyncratic co-founder, dominated of course by Walter Isaacson’s 2011 best seller, “Steve Jobs.” Although it drags and feels unnecessary for large stretches, this new addition to the Apple pantheon redeems itself with access to key players and their previously untold accounts, thereby presenting a layered portrait of the mercurial Jobs, whose style and personality, the book argues, were constantly evolving, right up to his early death.
