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What with Steve Jobs trying to block its publication, followed by the traumatic plunge of Apple's stock price to sync perfectly with its delayed release date, Vanity Fair contributing editor Alan Deutschman's unauthorised biography, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, couldn't have been marketed any better.

The book starts with Jobs at one of his lowest points, December 1992, just before the implosion of NeXT Computer, the company which Jobs formed after he was ousted from Apple in 1985. 'It was all going to hell. His followers were abandoning him. His friends no longer believed in him. The press, which had adored him for so long, now excoriated him. His money was running out. An awesome fortune nearly squandered,' writes Deutschman with suitably apocalyptic flourish.

For Jobs, history seemed to repeat itself in a dismal cycle. He had been thrown out of Apple in 1985 because, at the time, the Mac had been a critical success but a commercial disaster. At NeXT, Jobs had been destroyed by market forces when the NeXT Cube again was acclaimed but unsold.

Worse still, according to Deutschman, Jobs' founding of NeXT was motivated as much by a desire to take vengeance on Apple and prove he could manage a large company, as it was to make a visionary product. NeXT failed spectacularly and Deutschman's book describes the fall in a refreshingly direct story which verges into the tabloid with its personal revelations of Jobs' closely guarded personal life, while avoiding the technological and business speak baggage which sinks so many business biographies. So we get portraits of all Steve's girlfriends, whether they were vegan or not, and how he got married, rather than the lists of aborted hardware projects and angry business meetings that generally characterise this sort of book.

There are countless accounts of Jobs' appalling behaviour in his private and business life, and any number of exasperated colleagues and former friends acknowledging his odd mix of bullying, charisma and childishness:

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'I have arrived, I am Gil and I am fat,' is how Jobs regales the head of after-sales service at Apple.

This book is also about Jobs' unlikely success with Pixar, the one-time computer hardware and then software company which finally blossomed as an animation studio with blockbuster movies including Toy Story. But apart from bankrolling it through the bad days, Deutschman gives all the credit here to head animator Jon Lassiter rather than Jobs.

There are long passages in the book detailing all Jobs' foibles and setbacks, many of which are very amusing and readable, although the middle of the book gets a bit lost in the murky origins of Pixar. But even Deutschman seems at a loss to explain Jobs' role in Apple's extraordinary turnaround other than as a 'reign of terror' combined with shrewd marketing opportunism.

Deutschman concludes that Jobs' sheer persistence, determination to prevail, a near cult-like way of controlling the people who work for him, and a fair degree of luck are the causes for his turnaround and vindication. The book ends with Apple's shares peaking at an all-time high (around a pre-split $118, compared with today's sub-$20 slump) and conclusion that 'Steve Jobs had finally achieved his vindication'.

It's a neat story structure and an upbeat conclusion, but since the book's finish, the Apple and Jobs story has taken another dramatic twist, and this time for the worse.

Does Deutschman's book provide any insights into how Apple will respond? For one thing, he suggests that Jobs is paradoxically at his best when he is faced by adversity. He becomes more humble, resourceful and his powers of motivation are awesome. It's when he's successful that he becomes excessively arrogant and self-indulgent. Perhaps the over-priced G4 Cube with its faulty casing is the latest manifestation of the perpetual Jobs hubris.

Deutschman also contends that Jobs' real love is hardware and that he really enjoys such fripperies as manufacturing and looking at factories, all of which is quite at odds with his latter-day portrayal as Internet-savvy IT boss. Jobs calls himself a 'young industrialist' early on in the book.

It seems inevitable that Apple will soldier on with the second Cube that Jobs has unleashed on the world, and it's worth noting that by next year Jobs' second Cube will be running an updated version of the NeXT operating system (disguised as Mac OS X). This combination failed in 1992, but was Jobs then ahead of his time?

You get the feeling that Deutschman is getting ready to write The Third Coming of Steve Jobs: The Cube Years.