The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

Dead people. They are, in my opinion, the only suitable subjects for biographers.

How do you write about a life still being lived? Even if you do a terrific job, and the subject doesn’t expire for 10 or 15 more years, you or someone else ends up with more work to do, and so do your readers.

Worse yet, in my view, is the “authorized biography”, in which the person being written about grants special access or other privileges to the scribe. Usually, this results in some sort of unfortunate quid pro quo arrangement. An extreme example: Shakey, the 2002 tome on which Jimmy McDonough actually shared copyright with his subject, rocker Neil Young.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life is an authorized biography by Alice Schroeder about a man who’s very much among the living. Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha”, is at this time just about the richest fellow on the planet.

Given my admittedly narrow view of the proper form for biographies, I should hate this book. I don’t, and that’s a testament to Schroeder’s power as a writer. This is a fast-paced, precisely drawn profile of a man who, despite his high visibility in the financial world, isn’t someone we’ve known much about.

We do now. And despite her unfettered access to Buffett (Schroeder reportedly spoke with him for several thousand hours for this project), it appears he chose not to interfere with the result. Unless we’ve all been seriously hoodwinked, the man lives here on these pages, warts and all.

The young Warren Buffett was a financial prodigy but also something of a juvenile delinquent, and “The Snowball” makes it clear that the man who went on to make a fortune could have wound up in jail instead. Born 30 August 1930, he came into the world less than a year after the stock market crash of 1929. And in this grim atmosphere that would become known as the Great Depression, the boy proved that no matter how dire the arena, it’s possible to make money.

Warren sold chewing gum door to door, sold soft drinks, threw newspapers. Mostly, though, he saved money. And saved. And saved. By age 14, he was filing federal tax returns on his income. By 16, he had thrown half a million newspapers and had made $5,000. As Schroeder points out in a footnote, that sum in today’s money would be more than $50,000.

In junior high, though, when a new Sears store opened in Omaha, the boy and some friends found diversion in thieving from the sporting-goods department.

“We’d just steal the place blind,” Buffett recalls. “We’d steal stuff for which we had no use. We’d steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls.”

Buffett, who early on displayed an almost obsessive penchant for counting things, now counted golf balls as among his most prized loot from stealing, or, as he and his friends called it, “hooking”. He also found it hard to explain to his parents why his closet was overflowing with sacks of golf balls.

Mom and Pop were not amused. Warren told them a lie, “a crazy story”, about where he’d gotten the golf balls, but they didn’t buy it. Eventually Father lowered the boom: Quit screwing around or I will forbid you from running your newspaper delivery routes.

Faced with the potential loss of income, Warren Buffett made one of the most important business decisions of his young life: Fun and games weren’t worth this. He cleaned up his act. And went on to make financial history.

Moving through Columbia Business School and a brief stint as a stockbroker, he eventually acquired a textiles manufacturing company, Berkshire Hathaway. He also acquired part of the Washington Post. And bought the Buffalo Evening News. And got himself a piece of ABC. And snagged a small but not insignificant share of Coca-Cola.

And …Yeah. And so on, and on.

If Buffett in 2008 is not the world’s richest human being, well, he’s managed to fool Forbes, which isn’t easy to do. The financial magazine recently pegged Buffett’s wealth at $62 billion.

But the world’s richest man still lives in the house he bought half a century ago for a little more than $30-grand (it’s worth much more than that now, but it’s not a million-dollar home). His actual salary — not the compensation he has received from stock valuations and other income sources — is extremely modest compared with other corporate executives.

And that rebellious or individualistic streak that drove the teenage Buffett to steal from Sears just for the fun of it has never disappeared. Some of the more eyebrow-lifting passages in The Snowball are the ones that focus on his relationship with Astrid Menks.

In the late ’70s Buffett and his wife, Susie, began to see that they could not live together anymore. Yet despite their differences, they did not divorce. Susie moved to San Francisco; Warren remained in Omaha. And Susie, knowing her husband needed female companionship, called a friend: Astrid Menks.

Buffett and Menks have lived together for three decades. Yet Buffett did not marry Menks until after Susie’s death in 2004. For years holiday cards carried the signature “Warren, Susie and Astrid.”

Minor complaint: The Snowball dances a little when it comes to the obvious sexual questions here. Yet perhaps the situation is so obvious that Schroeder felt no need to be more blunt. In mid-life, Buffett and his wife clearly made a decision regarding their domestic arrangement that would not be acceptable to many of their Midwestern peers. And somehow, despite his profile in the financial world, managed to be honest about that arrangement with friends without having to deal with a lot of tabloid nonsense.

This biography has other flaws as well: Schroeder sometimes gets bogged down in details. I don’t need to know each and every magazine the man and his family read, thank you very much. Or that the dining tables in a private jet Buffett used on one occasion were made of bird’s-eye maple. I know what a Gulfstream IV is, though I’ve never been aboard one, and I assume those who do fly on them aren’t eating off plywood surfaces.

This excessive prose results in the book’s chief drawback: It is 960 pages long. True, the narrative ends at Page 838; the rest is notes and index and such.

Still, this is too much. Good as Schroeder’s writing is, and interesting as Buffett is, a good editor could have trimmed this book to a more manageable length. I enjoyed this biography, authorized or not. I just could have done with a little less bang for my buck.