Alice Schroeder has accomplished an impressive feat. The poor lady must have spent many hours at Gorat's watching Buffett devour his strict Colon Cancer diet. This beautifully written 940 page biography reveals aspects of the Buffett personality which alternately shocked and repelled me. For example, I had no idea that Buffett the teenager was an habitual shoplifter. If I had known this many years ago I might never have started collecting Berkshire shares.
His emotional neglect of his son Howie caused Howie to act up in order to gain his father's attention. Buffett gave neither money nor his personal time to his children. He spent his hours in his study and the children effectively had no father. It was as if he regarded them as a costly overhead expense that he tolerated to please his wife. Years later, when Howie ran for public office, Buffett refused to donate to his son's campaign.
Although he could be tough, heartless and greedy where money was concerned, he was a complete wuss in interpersonal relationships. His mother's criticisms of him as a child made him weep and he was terrified of her even as an adult. One wonders if his uncontrolled greed for cash was his way of building a moat around himself that his mother could not breach.
As his fame grew, he started spending time with his Yiddish princess, Kay. He stayed in her many luxurious residences while his wife lived alone in their small Omaha home now bereft of children. Naturally Susie, his wife, found this to be a lonely life and she started to look around for something to fill in the hours. She sang professionally and gave generously of her time to acquaintances who were needy. She is the true heroine of this book. Her generosity and innate goodness contrast sharply with the shallow greediness of the husband she was pressured into marrying. When Susie, on several occasions, had to enter hospital Buffett refused each time to visit his wife. Apparently the Miser of Omaha is terrified of hospitals and doctors. When his friend Kay lay near death it was his daughter Susie Jr who, after much effort, persuaded him to visit the bedside of his dying friend.
His entire life is based on the dictum: take but never give. The time eventually came when his wife Susie had had enough. She moved out to San Francisco and started enjoying herself. Buffett wept for days when he realized that his wife had left him. He begged her to return but to no avail. Susie asked a friend to look in on him & to cook him an occasional meal. Eventually the friend moved into the house. Buffett, the book clearly shows, is always on the lookout for a 'mommy' - a female who will shelter him, coddle him and make him feel 'safe'. He knows several such persons.
It wasn't until Susie died that Buffett started to have a real relationship with his children. He stopped regarding them as unnecessary expenses but started relating to them & giving them his time & his love which he had always denied them in childhood. He became aware of their feelings rather than being totally preoccupied with his own. He started to consider his children as being important in his life. For the first time he took an interest in what they were doing. His son Howie missed his father's companionship during his childhood very much. He appeared to ignore his son Peter pretty well completely until he became an adult. After Susie died, Buffett started to give Peter some attention and to treat him as a human being. The author says that Howie had yearned for a
close connection to his father all his life & had never received it. Howie & his wife moved to Omaha so that he could be near his father.
Buffett has now started giving his children big checks on their birthdays which he had never done before. He is trying to buy their love after depriving them of the most precious gift he could have given them in childhood - his personal time and personal attention.
The book describes how Buffett showed a real coldness to the adopted daughters of his son Peter. He told Peter they would receive nothing in his will. He wrote a cruel letter to Nicole Buffett, his son Peter's adopted daughter. The book doesn't really explain the meanness that Buffett displayed toward this girl.
The book errs in one respect. The author did not get it quite right about the issuance of Class "B" shares. They were issued because Katz, a Philadelphia mayoral candidate, was going to subdivide the "A" shares & issue a "B" share of his own. Buffett had Charlie Munster call Katz and try to bully him into withdrawing his plan but Katz would not budge. So Buffett, much against his wishes, had to bring out the "B" shares himself.
The book describes his difficulty in understanding and using computers which clearly shows that his success is not due to his IQ but rather to his phenomenal memory. His ability to remember countless past business scenarios and their outcomes allows him to make good business decisions.
As this marvelous book nears the end, it makes clear that it is so difficult & painful for Buffett to give away money, or bottle caps, or golf balls that he passed the job to the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation is actively supporting planetary overpopulation by distributing the money to Africa and the Africans, rather than returning it to the American citizens who made it possible for Buffett and Gates to accumulate this money in the first place.
Buffett has passed up an opportunity to be truly creative with his wealth. One can only wonder at the incredible advances in medicine that could be made if a large amount of this money were devoted to stem cell research. By giving it away Buffett looks ridiculous. After working all his life to accumulate something and then discarding it we must conclude he worked all his life for nothing. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, he leaves nothing behind for which he would be remembered. He will be quickly forgotten.
Some years after his wife Susie died, Buffett married his companion changing her status from a lowly live-in servant girl to a wife. One wonders if she had to sign a Pre-Nup.
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The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
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Excellent Book. I own four editions in English and ...
Excellent Book. I own four editions in English and one in Portuguese. I own another edition in Kindle. I had the impression that sometimes it was not the same book in Kindle. Some parts contained in the print Edition do not exist in the Last Kindle Edition. For example, page 551 in the print edition is different from the same part in the Kindle Edition. It seems that some parts of the first edition were eliminated from the last kindle edition.
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2025
Top reviews from other countries
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ErmannoReviewed in Italy on December 30, 2019
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
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- GZReviewed in India on April 14, 2023
WALKING ALONGSIDE BUFFET ON HIS JOURNEY OF LIFE ----- A COMPELLING READ !!
