Author tries unraveling the riddle of Steve Jobs

— -- For decades, journalists have toiled in vain to offer a peek behind the curtain of the Wizard of Cupertino, Calif.

Not for lack of trying.

Jobs has famously remained tight-lipped and cloistered in secrecy, offering interviews to few reporters. And, on those rare occasions, yielding little or no insights into his personal thoughts. In many ways, he is tech's version of Charles Foster Kane, the mysterious protagonist in Citizen Kane.

There have been book attempts. The best of the lot — Alan Deutschman's The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, snappily written and meticulously researched — got no closer to the inner Steve than anyone else.

Now comes a fresh, noble perspective from Leander Kahney, news editor at Wired.com and a longtime follower of Apple and its mercurial co-founder. Rather than float on the periphery of the Jobs gestalt, he's decided to get inside the man's head. (Jobs did not respond to Kahney's requests for an interview.)

What emerges is Inside Steve's Brain, which offers insightful nuggets on the mind/personality that helped create personal computers and digital music players for the rest of us while moonlighting as a modern-day Walt Disney at Pixar, the groundbreaking animation studio.

Kahney posits that Jobs has molded his conflicting personality traits into a business philosophy that has had as much impact on society as Henry Ford or Walt Disney.

According to Kahney's provocative book, Jobs is an elitist who dismisses most people as "bozos," yet he makes devices so simple anyone can use them. He's an obsessive creature with a volcanic temper, but he forges deep partnerships with creative artists such as Academy Award-winning animator John Lasseter, design whiz Jonathan Ivie and Steve Wozniak. A Buddhist, he produces mass-market goods in Asian factories, and he promotes them with the zeal of P.T. Barnum.