Books in Brief Capsule reviews of recently released books

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Apple Computer Corp. co-founder and chief executive officer Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster, $35

Walter Isaacson's new biography of the iconic Apple founder is 571 pages long, but when you've finished the last page, you won't feel you know or understand Steve Jobs.

That's partly because of Jobs' natural inscrutability, a combination of extreme privacy and a love of secrecy. And it's partly because the book, originally due next spring, was rushed to print when word surfaced that Jobs, who died in October, had only a short time left to live. That decision is apparent throughout the book, from typos to repetition to grammatical errors. (There are rampant dangling modifiers.)

Much of the first half of the book is a rehash of Jobs' past, less fulfillingly presented than in previous books. And while Isaacson often references Jobs' connection with his adoptive father, Paul, and how that connection helped forge in Jobs a love of design and how things work, there's no mention of the elder Jobs' death in 1993, and how that affected his son. Jobs' adoptive mother, Clara, and his sister, Patty, are barely mentioned.

For the full picture of both Jobs and the revolutionary company he founded, Isaacson's work might best be read alongside "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" by Alan Deutschman; "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything" by Steven Levy; and "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness," also by Levy.

Still, there is much in Isaacson's book to like and admire, revealing Jobs at both his best and his legendary worst.

Jobs cooperated with Isaacson, submitting to more than 40 interviews with the author. At times, his comments and answers are self-serving, possibly an attempt to polish his legacy as he realized his time was drawing near.

At other times, though, Jobs was revealing, discussing his friendship with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, his rivalry with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his years of illness with a candor he rarely displayed in public.

Isaacson also offers insight into Jobs' diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, his subsequent treatment and relapses and his liver transplant in Memphis.

Apple and Jobs had been super-secretive about his illness as it progressed, to the point that some of the company's board members had wondered if they had a legal obligation to disclose the seriousness of his condition.

Isaacson's access to Jobs in his final months uncovers his astonishing and ill-informed decision to wait nine months to have surgery after his tumor was found. Inexplicably, Jobs thought a new dietary regimen would help curtail the cancer, a decision that harkened back to his hippie, counterculture days.

But it was likely a plan that led to his death. There's a chance that if Jobs had had surgery immediately, the cancer would have been contained. Instead, it spread to his liver, ultimately necessitating the transplant and his temporary move to Memphis for the operation in 2009.

Isaacson's real service to history, and Jobs' fanbase, is the information he provides about Jobs' final years.

-- Jody Callahan, The Commercial Appeal

The Visible Man

By Chuck Klosterman

Scribner, $25

This updating of H. G. Wells' "The Invisible Man" -- a description author Chuck Klosterman self-consciously disagrees with in the opening pages of this, his latest novel -- is a very skillful but unsettling read.

Written as a nonfiction book proposal to a publisher by a fictional Austin, Texas, talk therapist named Victoria Vick, "The Invisible Man" is constructed as a series of session notes with one of Vick's patients, only ever identified as Y. This patient, Vick believes, suffers under the delusion that he can make himself invisible and presents himself for treatment because of his guilt over observing strangers without their knowledge. Vick attempts to treat this delusion and regards him as seriously deranged and deeply out of touch with reality.

At first Y will agree only to therapy sessions conducted over the phone with Vick at specific times. He claims that he worked at a university think tank that was funded by the military developing what he calls cloaking technology that rendered him invisible to the human eye. Her technical questions about this technology are usually dismissed by him with rude comments that she would not be intelligent enough to understand if he told her. He does tell her that the cloaking technology involves wearing a skin-tight suit which makes the wearer appear invisible.

Vick finally talks Y into coming to her office for conventional face-to-face talk therapy sessions and she is repulsed at his physical presence and lack of social skills. She keeps trying to confront and break down his delusion that this cloaking technology is real and that he can make himself invisible. Y insists that it is real and flies into a rage when Vick interrupts the hourlong tirades he considers therapy sessions. (Vick agrees to let Y speak uninterrupted during these sessions, the price extracted for his physical presence in her office.)

Eventually Y tells Vick that he will demonstrate the reality of this invisible suit he claims to own by showing up at her office in it for a session.

Vick's and the book's tone change after he proves the reality of cloaking technology to her in this way. The chapter about Y's invisible session with Vick is chilling and afterward there is a shift between patient and therapist. Vick becomes his student, curious to know what the experience of being invisible is like. Y accommodates her with a handful of stories about the people he has observed without their knowledge. His modus operandi is to gain entrance to a person's house or apartment and then silently observe them going about their daily lives in their most intimate, unguarded moments. He believes it's the only way to truly know someone and considers this stealth observation his work, or a research project. He also takes an impressive cocktail of stimulants including methamphetamine to allow him to continue this observation without the need for sleep.

Vick starts to ask Y questions about the morality of his mission to observe others without their knowledge and some of the life-threatening measures he has taken to "help" the persons he is observing which have resulted in near fatal drug overdoses and mental breakdowns. Y dismisses all of his therapist's objections and begins to show signs of classic Freudian transference when he confesses his sexual attraction toward her.

That's when the book turns predictably violent with several expected outcomes, none of which come across as clichéd, oddly enough: a testament to Klosterman's ability to invigorate older literary material with surprising psychological insights.

This unnerving and unsettling novel raises difficult questions about the nature of voyeurism and the dangers of talk therapy for patient and therapist alike. And Klosterman's ear for early 21st century therapy jargon and obsessive pop culture themes is pitch perfect. Very creepy, very entertaining. Highly recommended.

-- Ross Johnson is a Memphis musician and retired academic librarian.

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