Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson is an author.
Access is the method, and it comes out of the news business: Isaacson was managing editor of Time and then chairman of CNN before he wrote biography. He gets access, he interviews everyone standing near the subject, and he writes at a pace that assumes a reader on a plane. The subjects form a clear pattern: people who worked where art meets science, or where an idea meets a machine. Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, Elon Musk, with Henry Kissinger at the start and a group biography of six friends that he wrote with a co-author.
His strength is synthesis. He can carry a reader with no physics through relativity, or no art history through Leonardo's notebooks, without either flattering them or slowing to a crawl, and he is unusually good at finding the working habit that explains a career.
The weakness is the access itself. A book built on long, close access to a living subject inherits some of that subject's framing, and the recent books sit closer to their subjects than the historical ones do. Franklin and Leonardo, where nobody could call to complain, are the better books for exactly that reason. As of 2024 he teaches at Tulane, and he has been an interviewer on Amanpour & Company since 2018.
Books (16)
- Steve Jobs (2011)
- Leonardo da Vinci (2017)
- Einstein (2007)
- The Innovators (2014)
- Elon Musk (2023)
- Benjamin Franklin (2003)
- Invent and Wander (2020)
- American sketches (2009)
- Kissinger (1992)
- William Coupon (2018)
- Profiles in Leadership (2010)
- A Benjamin Franklin Reader (2005)
- The Code Breaker (2001)
- Today's best nonfiction (1992)
- The wise men: Six friends and the world they made (1986)
- Pro and con (1983)
Where to start with Walter Isaacson
Skip the famous one first time out. Benjamin Franklin has the best subject for his method, a self-inventing man who left an enormous paper trail, and none of the access problems that complicate the later work.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most pleasurable, largely because the notebooks do half the work. Steve Jobs is the one everybody reads, and it is genuinely good, but read it knowing the subject sat for it. Einstein is the hardest and most rewarding of the science books. The Innovators is the outlier, a group history of computing rather than a single life, and it makes his own argument about collaboration better than any of the solo portraits do. Elon Musk is the clearest test of whether you trust the method. The Code Breaker and The wise men: Six friends and the world they made are for readers already sold.
The technology biographies
The books that made him the default biographer of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs is unusually unflattering for an authorised life, and Elon Musk was written from two years of following its subject around, which shows in both directions.
The historical lives
The earlier and generally better books, where the archives do the work instead of access. Benjamin Franklin is the most enjoyable, Einstein is the best written, and Leonardo da Vinci is the one that most rewards the illustrations.
The collections and shorter work
The journalism and the edited volumes, which are where the Time and CNN years show. American Sketches gathers the shorter profiles and is a good sample of the method at essay length.