Updated 'Buffett' still timely

BUFFETT: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN CAPITALIST, by Roger Lowenstein, Random House, 483 pages, $19 (softcover)

Originally published in 1995, this revealing biography of Warren Buffett, named by Forbes Magazine as the world's richest man, is still timely in the updated 2008 edition.

Written by Roger Lowenstein, famed business journalist, it is an extended look into both Buffett the moneymaker and Buffett the great benefactor.

So-called "The Oracle of Omaha," Buffett comes off as a fascinating character with divergent interests and sound intuition. Lowenstein cites the rich man's patience, integrity and determination to trust his own judgment regardless of world problems. Buffett seems an economic ideal to watch at a time of recession, a mortgage crisis and proliferating bankruptcies.

Buffett has shown his inimitable tendency to continue to guide his businesses upward from the 1950s through the 1990s.

Unlike most financiers, Buffett has always chronicled his decisions as he goes, enabling him to learn from the process. He always said that just as he would not ask a barber if he needed a haircut,

he would not ask an investment banker whether to make a deal.

He has consistently seen himself as a self-made man from the Midwest, essentially a private man in spite of his occasional successes as a showman or a preacher. He still likes hamburgers, he lives in an inauspicious home on a tree-lined block, has no fabulous car -- but he does own a private jet.

Buffett early demonstrated himself to be a person who fully focuses on his work, almost without emotion, something not always appreciated by his wife, Susie, and his family. Susie, moreover, was an idealist who was always looking for causes to advance.

His children considered his home office "a temple" where their dad truly lost himself in his work. Usually, he was reading. It was said that Susie tolerated him because "You can't get mad at someone who is so funny."

He was known as an abstract man who once burst out of his office to ask his wife what happened to the greenback wallpaper in his study. Susie had changed it a couple of years earlier. Then he grabbed a Pepsi and went once more under cover.

When he was 34 in the 1960s, he decided to take over a troubled textile company in which he had gradually acquired stock, Berkshire Hathaway. He later combined the textile company in New Bedford, Mass., with an insurance company in Omaha, Neb. Asked how he succeeded in investing, Buffett said, "I read a couple thousand financial statements a year."

Although Buffett has had his ups and downs, he has always kept his quiet head in the books that will continue to teach him to build companies. To someone who meets him for the first time, he seems a very ordinary guy. But he is clearly not.

The author adds a new afterword to this book, explaining how Buffett dodged two major investment bubbles -- the dot.com episode and subprime mortgages. Buffett also recently announced his decision to give the majority of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"The man who taught America to invest is writing a new chapter on giving it away," Lowenstein wrote.

E-mail: dennis@desnews.com

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