There is so much public fascination with Warren Buffett that we actually found this 1,000-page biography being sold in a grocery store! From childhood, Buffett found solace with numbers and money, driven in part by a mother who regularly berated him as worthless.
Author Alice Schroeder keeps the narrative moving through Warren’s paper routes, horse track betting, his “slave labor” at granddad’s store, and juvenile schemes of a precocious and socially awkward boy. His first doubts about religion began when, out of boredom in church one day, he started calculating the life expectancy of the song writers in the hymnals and discovered no connection between religiosity and longevity.
Along the story of his youth, his education, and his move away from Wall Street back to his beloved home town of Omaha, Nebraska, the reader gets basic lessons about how the stock market functions, the potential of a dollar, how to value companies, and the value of human relationships. (But as one Amazon.com reviewer pointed out, you can get a lot of this straight from Buffet himself by reading his letters to shareholders and other reports on www.berkshirehathaway.com.) But there is a lot of new information in this lively biography of an obsessed creature of habit, including some surprises, such as his unusual triangular domestic situation, arranged by his loving wife.
The book’s title, The Snowball, comes from the image of Warren playing in the snow with his little sister Bertie, catching snowflakes. He scoops more flakes together, packs them into a ball, places it on the ground and starts rolling. He reaches the edge of his yard, looks around, and continues onward, “casting his eye on a whole world of snow”
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