Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The long awaited first authorized biography of Apple's enigmatic former CEO comes out this fall. Isaacson, an Atlantic contributor, former Time managing editor, and current head of the Aspen Institute, He did more than 40 interviews with Jobs in two years, as well as with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues to produce a definitive account of the tech icon's life, a book that will be all the more fascinating now that Jobs has stepped down from his role as CEO.

As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs wasn't a visionary or even a particularly talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and – when he was getting it right, which wasn't always – had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.

Isaacson's book is studded with moments that make you go "wow". There's the Apple flotation, which made the 25 year old Jobs $256m in the days when that was a lot of money. There is his turnaround of the company after he returned as CEO in 1997, in the previous fiscal year the company lost $1.04bn, but he returned it to profit in his first quarter. There's the launch of the iTunes store: expected to sell a million songs in six months, it sold a million songs in six days.