The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Alice Schroeder

A&C Black, Sep 16, 2009 - Business & Economics - 832 pages

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Prize 2008

The Snowball is the first and will be the only biography of the world's richest man, Warren Buffett, written with his full cooperation and collaboration.

Combining a unique blend of "The Sage of Omaha's" business savvy, life story and philosophy, The Snowball is essential reading for anyone wishing to discover and replicate the secrets of his business and life success.

Warren Buffett is arguably the world's greatest investor. Even as a child he was fascinated by the concept of risk and probability, setting up his first business at the age of six. In 1964 he bought struggling Massachusetts textile firm Berkshire Hathaway and grew it to be the 12th largest corporation in the US purely through the exercise of sound investing principles - a feat never equalled in the annals of business.

Despite an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion, Buffett leads an intriguingly frugal life taking home a salary of only £50,000 a year. His only indulgence is a private jet, an extravagance he wryly acknowledges by calling it "The Indefensible". In 2006, he made the largest charitable donation on record, with most of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Snowball provides a comprehensive, richly detailed insight one of the world's most extraordinary and much loved public figures.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - N7DR - LibraryThing

I struggled through the first 100+ pages before giving up. I could not persuade myself that it was reading any further about a small-time juvenile delinquent who was (or at least represented as being ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - kaulsu - LibraryThing

I listened to the audible, unabridged, version of this book. I found the book --extremely long at 800+ pages or 37 hours hours listening time-- absolutely engrossing. Buffett's life is like no one's ...

About the author

Alice Schroeder began her career as a certified public accountant, working for Ernst & Young before being appointed as a managing director at Morgan Stanley in the equities division. She was the number one-ranked Institutional Investor All-America Research Analyst in 2001 and 2002, and a member of the All-America Research team for seven years.
Schroeder first met Warren Buffett in 1998. By 2001, Buffett began to suggest that Alice shift from the business of following stocks in order to write full-time.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
• Author: Alice Schroeder
• Publisher: A&C Black, 2009
• ISBN: 1408807327, 9781408807323
• Length: 832 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General