Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Andy Grove, the man inside Intel Corp., should be a biographer's dream come true.

This is the boy from Budapest who survived the Nazi death machine, escaped Hungary after the Soviet crackdown of 1956, made his way to the U.S. as a penniless 20-year-old, and wound up as Intel's chief executive in the years when the chipmaker's profit soared from less than $250 million to more than $6 billion.

Few business executives so richly deserve a definitive biography, yet few are such a nightmare to profile. Grove, for all his celebrity, is a razor-tongued, protean polymath who keeps ``his private life private,'' as Richard S. Tedlow remarks in his aggravating study, ``Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American.''

Tedlow says Grove allowed him to read his private papers and gave him wide-ranging interviews and unique access to his wife, close friends and business associates. Nothing would be off limits. Nothing, it turns out, except the evanescent essence of Grove himself, a man who shrugs off the past, lives in the present and obsesses about the future.

More than a year after stepping down as Intel's chairman, and now suffering from Parkinson's disease, Grove remains the charismatic yet suspicious engineer who wrote ``Only the Paranoid Survive.'' If you've read that book and his own memoir, ``Swimming Across,'' you won't learn much more from Tedlow.

Unable to pin Grove down, the biographer is all too frequently forced to fall back on speculation for answers to crucial questions -- including why Intel missed a chance to acquire Cisco Systems Inc. when that nascent Silicon Valley superpower was worth just $200 million.

Long Story

It's not that Tedlow, who teaches at Harvard Business School, has written a bad book. ``Life and Times'' is actually an articulate primer about a company whose microprocessors drive personal computers the world over. Still, it's less a biography than an MBA case study of Intel tinted purple with hagiographic admiration. Grove is ``highly telegenic,'' Tedlow writes. ``He was the Enrico Fermi of the business world'' who made ``the atomic reactor called Intel'' go critical.

The author makes matters worse by larding his text with pro- forma digressions. ``This is a long story that should not be made short,'' he declares before launching into one of many clumps of rhetorical questions that clog the book: ``Who worked at Intel? Why was the company founded? Why did people continue to work there when they were economically secure?'' And so forth.

And yet beneath the academic padding, there's some real bone and muscle. Tedlow has a firm grip on how Intel beat the Japanese at their own game and helped drive International Business Machines Corp. out of the PC business.

Who Needs a PC?

Intel's turning points are all here. We see Grove inviting himself in 1968 to become the startup's third employee: ``I'm going with you,'' he told co-founder Gordon Moore, the man who famously predicted that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double every two years or so.

We're reminded of how Intel almost signed away the rights to its first microprocessor, the integrated circuit that sparked what became the desktop revolution. In the mid-1970s, someone approached Moore with ``an idea for what was basically the PC,'' he later recalled. ``What's it good for?'' Moore asked.

We also witness IBM's fateful decision to use Intel chips in its PCs, thereby spawning a brood of clones.

Tedlow is at his best when analyzing such ``strategic inflection points,'' as Grove calls them. The chapters on the Intel Inside campaign and the Pentium-chip bug should be required reading for MBA candidates. He also understands why Intel's ProShare videoconferencing system flopped: ``Grove assumed he had an iPod. He wound up with an Edsel.''

Show and Tell

Unfortunately, there's more tell than show in this book. Though Tedlow adeptly weaves historical context into the narrative, he repeatedly interrupts the story with professorial asides. He quotes Homer, Shakespeare and Tennyson. He compares Grove's appointment as Intel's chief executive in 1987 to the day Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940. Come again?

The book does occasionally hint at Grove's dark side, including the foul mouth and ``anger attacks'' that could turn employees ``into mush.'' It also catalogs opportunities Intel missed when it shunned acquisitions even as the likes of Cisco, Google Inc. and EBay Inc. emerged.

In the end, though, Tedlow is so laudatory that you conclude he got too chummy with his subject. Tedlow, to his credit, admits that Grove's magnetism ``must have colored this account.'' No need to speculate on that.

``Andy Grove'' is from Portfolio (568 pages, $29.95).

(James Pressley is an editor for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: James Pressley in Brussels at jpressley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 15, 2006 00:00 EST