A review by shubhamshetty
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

3.0

This was a dense read - I took two months to get through it - and the author obviously took great pains to weave together five years worth of research together to form a coherent outline of the life of the greatest investor in the world. Before I read this, I had absolutely zero knowledge about Warren Buffett other than the fact that he was a billionaire investor and head of Berkshire Hathaway. You don't hear too much about him in popular media, unlike his other compatriots Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos. After reading this, I can say I know about most of his work and achievements. Yet, I feel the picture she tried to present of the man behind the legend wasn't all that clear. I'm not the biggest reader of biographies, so my opinion may be uninformed, but I guess that character development works the same way for both fiction and non-fiction. The depiction of Buffett seemed inconsistent early on. After reading pages and pages about how Buffett was super motivated to make money and a sort of financial wiz as a teenager, we learn he suffered from self-doubt and anxiety just before he gets married. This was the one thing I felt was jarring in what otherwise was a great first half. However, as Buffett's personal value and the complexity of his investments increased, the story became more muddled and complicated. The descriptions of his later financial dealings and all the business argot was quite confusing for a layperson like me, and I'm sure I didn't understand more than half of what I read. All in all, this book was a good introduction to the man behind the legend, but for a more detailed and in-depth understanding, you'll have to look elsewhere.