Elon Musk
How do you take the full measure of an increasingly troubled figure whose life’s work and legacy still hang in the balance? At stake is not just Musk’s place in history, but also his place in the present and future. If Isaacson fails to pin that down in a satisfying way, it might be because Musk is such a fast-moving target, and Isaacson prioritized revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens ... Fortunately, the juicy details are plentiful, especially in the book’s final third, which covers the two especially volatile years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk ... It’s clear Isaacson intends for Elon Musk to be more than a bunch of interesting stories about a controversial guy. He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk’s core. But the central question he sets out to answer in the book’s prologue feels a bit too easy ... Though the destination lacks suspense, the ride is entertaining enough, particularly for those who haven’t closely followed Musk’s high jinks. And despite the book’s length, it zips along thanks to Isaacson’s economical prose and short chapters.
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As we learn throughout the book, the Musks are persistent fabulists, prone to embellishment and fabrication, and this becomes the first of many narrative sequences that the reader must consider with an eye to truth versus narrative convenience ... Isaacson’s truth is, above all, selective ... Silences...come to haunt the capacious hull of Elon Musk — to the point that they risk drowning out the project altogether ... The narrative is filled with moments of...dissonance ... The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject’s capacity to be cruel. In exchange, the subject’s greatness will be treated as an assumption ... No biography can or should be totally comprehensive, but it’s pretty easy to conclude which sorts of topics and conversations Isaacson decided it would be best to avoid altogether. I started Elon Musk wondering if the world needed another book positioning Musk as a great man...and finished thinking it’s time to retire the entire genre of 'great innovator' biographies, period.
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A book that can scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises infinitely more questions than it answers ... How does a biographer begin to write about such a man? ... Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s childhood, barely mentions apartheid himself. He writes at length and with compassion about the indignities heaped upon young Elon by schoolmates ... Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up.
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