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发现经过一个周末，全世界关于巴老的新闻，无非是他最近在大跌中入股，衍生产品上大亏，以及关于他的新传。昨天转了一位Londoner的传记评论，今天再来一篇，出手于和巴老渊源甚深的报社??The Buffalo News（曾经叫做Buffalo Evening News，熟悉上一本巴老传记的朋友应该都知道，巴老在1977年买下它的时候，可是经过一段比较长的艰苦卓越战斗，才把它的对手击垮，使其成为一架赚钱机器的。），有点意思，转给大家看看：
Warren Buffett married his longtime companion Astrid Menks in 2006 in a private ceremony. Associated Press 11/30/08 07:12 AMUp close and personal with Warren BuffettBy Lee Coppola
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER “The Snowball”? Kind of a strange title, don’t you think? But in its simplicity it captures the business philosophy of the man who perennially ranks as one of the richest in the world. His personal life, on the other, is far more complicated. Alice Schroeder provides a splendid and richly detailed examination of both sides of Buffett in “The Snowball.” And well she should, having been granted unlimited access for five years to the main subject, his friends, his family and his files. Thankfully, for readers interested in finding out what makes a billionaire tick, Schroeder didn’t waste the opportunity. How else could she have known that at an elegant dinner in his honor in the Manhattan apartment of the head of Sony, Buffett didn’t eat a thing. “The waiter brought out another unidentifiable course of something that looked rubbery and raw to him. Time crawled more slowly with each course. He had been counting and the number of courses now exceeded ten. He tried to make up for his culinary lapses with witty, self-deprecating conversation about business . . . but he knew he was disgracing himself. Even in the middle of the bonfire of embarrassment he could not help but think longingly of hamburgers.” That’s typical of the inside views Schroeder gives her readers. Buffett, it turns out, is a man who likes simple things. Despite his vast fortune, he lives in the same $31,000 Omaha, Neb., house he’s lived in most of his adult life. He eschews stylish wardrobes, drinks Coca-Cola and for years traveled commercial air while lesser lights in the business world flew in their corporate jets. When he finally bought a used Falcon, he was embarrassed. The simple tastes reflect his investment philosophy, summed up in the title: find some wet snow, make a ball and roll it down a long hill. It’s the same with investments: “estimate an investment’s intrinsic value, handicap its risk, buy using margin of safety, concentrate, stay in the circle of competence, let it roll as compounding did the work.” Buffett started his road to riches by forming investment partnerships with others willing to risk their money on his savvy. Berkshire Hathaway, the investment conglomerate that’s given him world renown and respect, was a faltering textile mill in New England that Buffett thought had a chance to rebound. It never did, but as an investment vehicle it has reached astronomical heights on the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares now sell for six figures. In fact, a $1,000 investment in Berkshire Hathaway in 1957 was worth $12 million 39 years later. Buffet was born nine months after the 1929 stock market crash into a poor family, so poor that as an infant his toy was an old toothbrush. But the poverty didn’t last long. His father eventually became a successful stockbroker and, as a conservative Republican, won election to the House of Representatives. His son was fixated by numbers. As a child, he and a friend wrote down license plate numbers on passing cars so they could calculate their frequency. Buffett also was obsessed with making money. At 6, he sold packs of chewing gum. At 10 he boasted he wanted to be a millionaire by age 35 (he made it five years younger); at 11 he bought his first stock; and in junior high he took stock charts to school, where math was the only subject that interested him. When he moved to Washington with his congressman father, he delivered newspapers, saved his money and by 16 had pocketed $5,000, a tidy sum that today translates to $56,000. He also owned a 40- acre tenant farm back in Nebraska, which he bought for $1,200 and split the profits with others who did the work. That was the precursor to his method of making money: buy solid businesses, let others do the work and use the profits to invest in other businesses. Schroeder traces Buffett’s business career through the companies he’s bought and the decisions he’s made. She examines them all, recording with intimate details the highs and lows of his career. One notable moment was Buffett’s purchase of the newspaper publishing this review, where his name remains on the masthead as chairman. It was his fascination with newspapers and his desire to own one that led him in 1977 to purchase the then Buffalo Evening News. Schroeder details the agonizing events Buffett weathered as the paper fought a subscription and advertising battle with the then Courier Express. At the time, the $35.5 million the paper cost Buffett was his single largest investment, and the struggle with the competing Courier turned News’ profits into a $1.4 million loss. Writes Schroeder: “Buffett was chilled by the news. No business he had ever owned had lost so much money so fast.” However, Buffett’s purchasing decision eventually proved wise once The News became the only newspaper in Buffalo, and a very successful one at that. Buffett’s fascination with newspapers started in Omaha, where Buffett’s weekly newspaper, at his prodding and with his help, exposed excesses by the venerable Boys Town that earned the paper a Pulitzer Prize. The fascination also led him to the Washington Post and to Katherine Graham, the Post’s late editor. She, as Schroeder reports, was one of several women in Buffett’s life. There was his wife, Susan. She left Omaha for San Francisco to pursue a singing career but never left her marriage to Buffett despite the different lives they led. There was Astrid Menks, who, with his wife’s blessing, moved into Buffett’s Omaha house after Susan moved out. He married her in 2006, two years after his wife died of a cerebral hemorrhage. And there was Graham, who introduced him to society, traveled with him and provided him a place to stay when he was in Washington or New York. Schroeder traces in intimate detail his relationship with each of them and their influence on him but, even as she details parties, vacations, discussions and feelings, she discreetly stops at the bedroom door. “More women to take care of him was something that he had always rationalized,” writes Schroeder. “His desire to be taken care of by women was so overwhelming that he mostly left it up to the women to settle any differences in their hellbent desire to do what, in each of their opinions, was in his best interest.” It’s obvious also that Buffett cared deeply for the women in his life. When Graham died he grieved for weeks, his eyes tearing at the mention of her name. He was ashamed that his grief stopped him from eulogizing her at the funeral. It was worse when his wife died. Although they had lived an unconventional married life, their love for each other persisted, Schroeder writes. “He could not escape the grief, even in sleep,” Schroeder writes, then recounts his recurring nightmare of riding helplessly in the front seat of the ambulance with his dying wife in the back. Schroeder, a former CPA, was a Wall Street analyst when she met Buffett. He liked the way she wrote about finances, so when she proposed a book about Warren Buffett, the person, not about Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, he agreed. Top-notch biographies demand thorough research (attested in this one by 89 pages of end notes) and crisp, finely honed writing. Schroeder exhibits both. “The Snowball” took her five years to write, and her work is enriched by the italicized direct quotes of the subject interspersed throughout the book. Given the unlimited access accorded her and the intimacies the book reveals, it’s hard to imagine a more complete account of Buffett’s life had he written it himself. NONFICTION The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life By Alice Schroeder Bantam Books 960 pages, $35 Lee Coppola is the dean of St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Journalism.
PS:
读后观感，其深度和广度远不如上面那位伦敦老兄的评论，如非渊源深厚，实在不值得一转，权作消遣吧。
［此帖子已被 atcoolman 在 2008-12-1 11:34:43 编辑过］ | 
楼主
发表于 2008-12-31 00:57:20
发表于 2008-12-7 22:39:20
