Walter Isaacson Books

From the author of bestselling biographies, this astonishingly intimate story explores the life of a controversial innovator who has led the world into electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence, while also taking over Twitter. As a child in South Africa, Elon Musk faced relentless bullying, culminating in a brutal attack that left him hospitalized. The emotional scars from his father, a charismatic engineer, would shape his psyche, resulting in a complex personality marked by dramatic mood swings, a high tolerance for risk, and an intense sense of mission. By early 2022, after a year of remarkable achievements—SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets, Tesla selling a million cars, and Musk becoming the world's richest man—he reflected on his tendency to create crises. His comment about needing to shift his mindset hinted at a deeper struggle, even as he secretly acquired shares of Twitter, the ultimate playground he once longed to own. For two years, the author shadowed Musk, attending meetings and interviewing family, friends, and adversaries. The result is a revealing inside story filled with tales of triumph and turmoil, addressing the demons that drive Musk and what it truly takes to foster innovation and progress.

This riveting biography captures the transformation of modern life in the information age through the lens of its supernaturally gifted subject. Based on over forty interviews with Steve Jobs and more than a hundred conversations with family, friends, adversaries, and colleagues, it chronicles the intense personality and rollercoaster life of a creative entrepreneur whose relentless pursuit of perfection revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Jobs cooperated fully, requesting no control over the content or the opportunity to review it before publication, encouraging honesty from those who knew him. He speaks candidly about his experiences, and his friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, and compulsion for control that defined his business approach and the innovative products he created. In a new afterword commemorating the tenth anniversary of his death, the author highlights how Jobs's vision remains vital today.

The best-selling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns. In 2012, Nobel Prize winning scientist Jennifer Doudna hit upon an invention that will transform the future of the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. It has already been deployed to cure deadly diseases, fight the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and make inheritable changes in the genes of babies. But what does that mean for humanity? Should we be hacking our own DNA to make us less susceptible to disease? Should we democratise the technology that would allow parents to enhance their kids? After discovering this CRISPR, Doudna is now wrestling these even bigger issues. THE CODE BREAKERS is an examination of how life as we know it is about to change - and a brilliant portrayal of the woman leading the way.

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and a guide to how innovation really works. What talents allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their disruptive ideas into realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? In his exciting saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He then explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so creative. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity and teamwork, this book shows how they actually happen.

He was history's most creative genius, and his secrets can inspire us. This exciting biography brings Leonardo da Vinci to life through thousands of pages from his remarkable notebooks and recent discoveries about his life and work. The author weaves a narrative that connects Leonardo's art to his science, illustrating how his genius stemmed from skills we can cultivate ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and a playful imagination. His creativity emerged from the intersection of the humanities and technology. He meticulously studied cadavers, capturing the muscles that animate the lips, ultimately painting the unforgettable smile of the Mona Lisa. He delved into the mathematics of optics, demonstrating how light interacts with the eye and creating illusions of perspective in The Last Supper. The author also highlights how Leonardo's enthusiasm for theatrical productions influenced his artistic and inventive processes. His unique ability to merge art and science, exemplified by his drawing of a figure within a circle and square, remains a timeless blueprint for innovation. His life serves as a reminder of the importance of fostering not only knowledge but also a spirit of inquiry and imagination, encouraging us and future generations to think differently, like the talented misfits and rebels of any era.

Einstein was a rebel and nonconformist from boyhood days, and these character traits drove both his life and his science. In this narrative, Walter Isaacson explains how his mind worked and the mysteries of the universe that he discovered.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years - - as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues - - the author offers a fascinating look at the co-founder and leading creative force behind the Apple computer company.

Walter Isaacson's #1 New York Times bestselling history of our third scientific revolution: CRISPR, gene editing, and the quest to understand the code of life itself, is now adapted for young readers!When Jennifer Doudna was a sixth grader in Hilo, Hawaii, she came home from school one afternoon and found a book on her bed. It was The Double Helix, James Watson's account of how he and Francis Crick had discovered the structure of DNA, the spiral- staircase molecule that carries the genetic instruction code for all forms of life. This book guided Jennifer Doudna to focus her studies not on DNA, but on what seemed to take a backseat in biochemistry: figuring out the structure of RNA, a closely related molecule that enables the genetic instructions coded in DNA to express themselves. Doudna became an expert in determining the shapes and structures of these RNA molecules-an expertise that led her to develop a revolutionary new technique that could edit human genes. Today gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR are already being used to eliminate simple genetic defects that cause disorders such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia. For now, however, Jennifer and her team are being deployed against our most immediate threat-the coronavirus-and you have just been given a front row seat to that race.

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution. Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

A captivating blend of personal biography and public drama, The Wise Men introduces the original best and brightest, leaders whose outsized personalities and actions brought order to postwar Averell Harriman, the freewheeling diplomat and Roosevelt's special envoy to Churchill and Stalin; Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who was more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than Truman and for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall; George Kennan, self-cast outsider and intellectual darling of the Washington elite; Robert Lovett, assistant secretary of war, undersecretary of state, and secretary of defense throughout the formative years of the Cold War; John McCloy, one of the nation's most influential private citizens; and Charles Bohlen, adroit diplomat and ambassador to the Soviet Union.