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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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