Monday, Nov. 03, 2008
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
You've met Buffett the investor, the coolheaded gunslinger with an X-ray eye for buying good firms cheap. Now meet Buffett the person: an emotionally needy husband and absentee father who avoids anyone he fears might criticize him. Even people who don't care a whit about business will be intrigued by this portrait of a boy who endured a verbally abusive mother and grew into a man desperately dependent on a series of women to shore up his fragile psyche, even as he became the richest person on the planet. Schroeder, a former insurance-industry analyst, spent years interviewing Buffett, and the result is a side of the Oracle of Omaha that has rarely been seen.