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The University of Berkshire Hathaway

Name: The University of Berkshire Hathaway
Author: Daniel Pecaut

by Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A rare view into the mind of Warren Buffett.

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A record of 30 years of holding company Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meetings, replete with insight into the minds of the company’s leaders.

Berkshire Hathaway chairman, president, and CEO Warren Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha,” has become a near-mythical figure in the world of investing, an exemplar of success, and a role model emulated by many. In his debut, investment adviser Pecaut, with his longtime business partner Wrenn, details every annual Berkshire Hathaway investor meeting since 1984. The book begins with a concise history of the company’s rise to dominance as it eventually amassed more than $500 billion in assets. The bulk of the book, though, is comprised of brief accounts of Buffet’s lectures and responses to questions from the crowd, as well as the perspective of his vice chairman, Charlie Munger. (As the meetings become more popular and longer, the notes expand as well.) Both Buffett and Munger share their insights into a broad spectrum of topics, sometimes going beyond financial matters to address politics and life in general. Buffett shares the central tenets of his value-investing philosophy, his thoughts on derivatives, his belief that inflation is largely a political phenomenon, and the reasons why the trade deficit is a bigger deal than a federal budget deficit. Buffett often delights in contradicting the academic notion of efficient (and therefore predictable) markets. Sometimes, it’s interesting to see where Buffett seemed to have it wrong; for example, he overestimated the fundamental health of the newspaper industry as well as China’s auto-industry business model. The book doubles as a memoir of sorts, as Pecaut recounts his own career arc, starting as a philosophy major at Harvard and becoming a lifetime student of investment strategy. This is a long book, and as one might expect, there’s a fair amount of redundancy; not every annual meeting offers an entirely novel set of issues to discuss. Also, because this is meant as a “curated collection of the best advice and insights Buffett and Munger have shared over the last three decades,” and not an exacting work of history, it would have made more sense if it were arranged thematically rather than chronologically. However, seasoned investors, as well as Buffett fans, will find plenty of value in this storehouse of financial counsel.

A rare view into the mind of Warren Buffett.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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BOSSYPANTS

by Tina Fey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2011

Highly recommended, even for those who have already read the excerpts in the New Yorker. Fey is one of the funniest people...

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One of the world’s cleverest comedy writers debuts with a frequently hilarious memoir.

Perhaps best known to mass audiences for her writing and performances on Saturday Night Live, Fey’s most inventive work is likely her writing for the critically acclaimed TV show 30 Rock, in which she stars alongside Alec Baldwin and fellow SNL alum Tracy Morgan. In typical self-deprecating style, the author traces her awkward childhood and adolescence, rise within the improv ranks of Second City and career on the sets of SNL and 30 Rock. The chapter titles—e.g., “The Windy City, Full of Meat,” “Peeing in Jars with Boys” and “There’s a Drunk Midget in My House”—provide hints at the author’s tone, but Fey is such a fluid writer, with her impeccable sense of comic timing extending to the printed page, that near-constant jokes and frequent sidebars won’t keep readers from breezing through the book with little trouble, laughing most of the way. Though she rarely breaks the onslaught of jokes (most at her own expense), she does offer an insightful section on the exhaustively analyzed concept of the “working mom,” which she finds tedious. (Even here, the author finds plenty of room for humor—not wanting to admit she uses a nanny, Fey writes, “I will henceforth refer to our nanny as our Coordinator of Toddlery.”) Fey may not sling a lot of dirt about her many famous co-stars in Second City, SNL and 30 Rock, but her thoughts on her geeky adolescence, the joys of motherhood and her rise to TV stardom are spot-on and nearly always elicit a hearty laugh. Even the jacket copy is amusing: “Once in a generation a woman comes along who changes everything. Tina Fey is not that woman, but she met that woman once and acted weird around her.”

Highly recommended, even for those who have already read the excerpts in the New Yorker. Fey is one of the funniest people working today.

Pub Date: April 5, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-316-05686-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2011

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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WHERE I WAS FROM

by Joan Didion ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2003

Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.

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With humor, history, nostalgia, and acerbity, Didion (Political Fictions, 2001, etc.) considers the conundrums of California, her beloved home state.

Pieces of this remarkable memoir have appeared in the writer’s usual venues (e.g., the New York Review of Books), but she has crafted the connections among them so artfully that the work acquires a surprising cumulative power. Didion tells a number of stories that would not in lesser hands appear to be related: the arrival in California of her pioneer ancestors, the nasty 1993 episode involving randy adolescents who called themselves the “Spur Posse,” the fall of the aerospace industry in the 1990s, her 1948 eighth-grade graduation speech (“Our California Heritage”), the history of the state, and the death of her parents. Along the way she deals with some California novels from earlier days, Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon and Frank Norris’s The Octopus, and explores the community histories of Hollister, Irvine, and Lakewood (home of the Posse). She sees fundamental contradictions in the California dream. For one, older generations resented the arrival of the “newcomers,” who in their minds were spoiling the view. But as Didion points out, the old-timers had once done the same. More profound is her recognition that Californians, many of whom embrace the ideal of rugged individualism and reject “government interference,” nonetheless have accepted from the feds sums of money vast enough to mesmerize Midas. Water-management programs have been especially costly, but tax breaks for all sorts of other industries and enterprises have greatly enriched some in the state (railroad magnates, housing developers, defense contractors) while most everyone else battles for scraps beneath the table. Most affecting are her horrifying portrait of Lakewood as a community devoted to high-school sports at the expense of scholarship and her wrenching accounts of the deaths of her father and mother.

Demonstrates how very thin is the gilt on the Golden State.