By now, you may have heard: Steve Jobs could be a bad guy. He berated and belittled his colleagues. He manipulated people, and the truth, to suit his ends.

But the Apple CEO's "reality distortion field" was also a force for good. When he gave people seemingly impossible tasks, it was often with the message: You can do this. Often, to their own surprise, they could. Jobs burned more than his share of bridges, but he also inspired loyalty.

In "Steve Jobs" (Simon & Schuster, 630 pages, $35), the remarkable biography released just days after Jobs' death, Walter Isaacson, the former editor of Time magazine and author of bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, gives us our most complete look at the enfant terrible who founded Apple, found himself exiled, then returned to lead the company from the brink of bankruptcy to the pinnacle of the technology world.

Of course, the reason we've paid the price of admission is to hear Jobs on Jobs, thanks to the unprecedented access he granted to Isaacson. On this level, "Steve Jobs" delivers -- because of Jobs, yes, but also because of all the other insiders who gave Isaacson the green light: Microsoft's Bill Gates, Google's Eric Schmidt, former Apple CEO (and Jobs bête noire) John Sculley and a galaxy of Apple insiders and Jobs intimates -- on the record.

The problem: Isaacson has such a wealth of voices to juggle that his own gets a little lost. Compared with "Benjamin Franklin" and "Einstein," the result feels less like literature and more like a very long-form piece of journalism. It's mostly a fascinating one, sketched in fine detail -- sometimes too fine, as the second half of the book starts to feel like the ticking-off of bullet points: iMac. iPod. iPhone. iPad.

Isaacson puts his finger on the formative experiences that informed Jobs' artist's sensibility, such as the clean, simple design (sound familiar?) of the home where he spent his early childhood. But, just like some of Jobs' closest friends, he struggles to reconcile Bad Steve and Good Steve. Isaacson pronounces Jobs "the greatest business executive of our era," on a pedestal with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, thanks to Jobs' ability to marry art and technology. Still, despite all we learn about him, Jobs remains a maddening enigma.

Jobs didn't want the book to be a whitewash, and it isn't. But perhaps, as the New York Times' Joe Nocera suggested last month, Isaacson felt less comfortable analyzing and passing judgment on someone he got to know personally than someone he was bringing to life from historical sources.

So "Steve Jobs" is not the last word on Steve Jobs. That will have to wait for another biographer, benefiting from the passage of time. But that biographer will owe a great debt to Walter Isaacson.

Casey Common is a Star Tribune copy editor.