A blue-chip biography that not only brings Warren Edward Buffett to vivid life but also pays detailed tribute to the integrity, patience, and acumen that have made the low-key Nebraskan arguably the greatest investor ever. While Wall Street Journal correspondent Lowenstein was unable to secure Buffett's cooperation, the Midas-touch money manager did not actively oppose the project. Accordingly, the author was able to produce a well-rounded portrait of Buffett with help from his family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the public record. A son of the heartland (and a US congressman who represented a staunchly Republican district in Omaha), the future financier was precociously numerate and interested in the stock market from an early age. At Columbia University's graduate school of business, he studied under Benjamin Graham, an idol whose securities-analysis doctrines remain valid in a global-investment arena where professionals have a range of theories that owe more to computer assistance than common sense. Back in his hometown, Buffett (who turns 65 this year) employed Graham's bedrock principles of value to amass small fortunes for himself and those with enough faith to commit to his private partnerships. Lowenstein provides a coherent account of how Buffett went on to make his current fiefdom (Berkshire Hathaway) the most expensive equity on the New York Stock Exchange, thanks to sizable, shrewdly timed positions in American Express, Capital Cities/ABC, Coca-Cola, and other immensely rewarding issues. Covered as well are Buffett's precious few errors, e.g., a substantive stake in scandal-ridden Salomon Brothers. Nor does the author shy away from Buffett's nontraditional stylenotable, among other matters, for a live-in mistress and cordial relations with an earth-mother wife from whom he is separated but not divorced. An engrossing, diligently documented audit of a billionaire who gained great wealth the old-fashioned way, i.e., by earning it. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41584-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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