I parsed it in one pass (don't have strong feelings for pleasure or pain on it). It's not the best sentence ever, but I don't really see the problem with it. To

I parsed it in one pass (don't have strong feelings for pleasure or pain on it). It's not the best sentence ever, but I don't really see the problem with it. To find out, how about we try to say the same thing in a different style: >Issaacson's book is surprising, because his last book was about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was portrayed in that book as a radical and congenitally irascible individual. The kind we think of as totally "American". Now, since Isaacson's book was kind to Jobs, we might think that he is in favor of such an individualistic understanding of genius. It is thus surprising that his new book strongly praises the virtue of three ideas: (1) cooperation in general, (2) the idea that collective effort has a multiplicative result from its individual parts, and (3) the way that industry, academia, and government can work together with exceptional results. These are antithetical to the myth of the lone genius that appears in the Jobs book. So, like we said, it's surprising. ..... All he's saying here is that he's surprised because one book seemed to argue for the individual, and this new one argues for collective effort. I, for one, find his version easy to read, and my version to be easy to understand, but boring. You'll also notice it's not actually any shorter, and I find that breaking things into short sentences gets more tedious to read than a long, well-formed sentence. It forces you to really be pedantic, like with my closing sentence - which was necessary to tie all those individual short sentences together. In a long sentence, those are just subclauses, so you don't have be repetitious about the hierarchy of meaning.