It was his second year in grade school, and little Warren Buffett was on a frenzied collecting spree. He was scoping the whole town for bottle caps ? Pepsi, root beer, Coca-Cola, ginger ale. Sorting and counting the caps every day was his way of relaxing, but it also told him which soft drinks were doing well. The thing that amazed him was that there was this stockpile of free information floating around, and no body was paying it any mind at all!

That was 1937. Cut to 50 years later, and the kid had been anointed the Oracle of Omaha who was as at home in the market as an ?oversexed man in a harem?. His habit of pulping Wall Street year after year had captured front-page attention and he had broken into the top ten of the rich ranks. He had also cut a special deal with the Wall Street Journal?s local distributor. When the newspaper arrived in town, a copy was placed into Buffett?s driveway before midnight, and the man stayed up reading the news that everybody else would only get to see the next day. Even on the days when he couldn?t take advantage of this deal, such as when he made his first foray into China accompanied by Bill Gates in 1994, Buffett made sure he got to read the Journal every day, without fail.

This is one thing that biographer Alice Schroeder hammers in throughout The Snowball, that as special as is Buffett?s ?capital-allocation wiring?, forcefully channeling his natural drive to collect money into the right stocks at the right time (mostly), none of this would have come to fruition if it hadn?t been accompanied by the hard, hard work of staying constantly updated. To hear her tell it, all the newspapers and economic statistics that he sucks in word by word, all the effort he puts into staying connected with the world of politics so he can analyse how it will impact the business world, and all the time he spends figuring out why one business will have a better customer-connect than another, Buffett?s commitment to all these information investments has not deteriorated in energy or intensity over time. Now the richest man in the world, he is still collecting and deconstructing data just as obsessively as he was doing as a kid.

But the tome that Schroeder has put together is as much a history of America as of its wealthiest creation. In taking the measure of man, his biography does after all also give an appraisal of his times. And Buffett has lived through some interesting and epoch-altering times. In the weeks marking his first birthday in 1931, there were sweaty people shuffling up the queues outside the nation?s banks, ?silently repeating a financial rosary: Please God, let there be money left when it?s my turn?. As the echoes of that Great Depression toll their dismal ring once again, Buffet is in his seventies. But he has been there to bailout GE with a $3 billion investment and Goldman Sachs with another $5 billion. Of course, Buffett being Buffett, some say he has got sweetheart deals on both these investments. But as Eric Rosenfield said, when the world goes mad, nothing works but capital. Those that have any to spare right now are more, much more, than their weight in gold.

Buffett was 11 when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbour, and to his right-wing father it was clear that this attack had been engineered by the Democrats, to get the Americans into ?the European war?. For a man who grew up with such conspiracy theories around him, as well as a de facto segregation by both race and religion, it must be ?interesting? to see the tide turning. This time around it?s a Republican-engineered war that some are smelling, the black people who don?t think that 9/11 was the work of Bin Laden at all. A chauvinist argument just as unjustifiable as that of Buffett?s father.

Breaking with convention

What Schroeder?s accounting communicates is how impressively Buffett?s thinking has transcended the prejudices surrounding his childhood. With women, this has clearly been a complex process. On the one hand, he remains heavily influenced by the I Love Lucy prototype, wherein Ricky Ricardo famously proclaimed: ?I want a wife who?s just a wife.? One after another, the women in his life have been put in charge of feeding him, clothing him, revering him ?as if it were a daily sacrament?. On the other hand, in subscribing to the loaded dictate about women being more loyal and hard working in general, he has filled his life with unconventional super-achievers rather than more conventional counterparts. Schroeder is just one such, who came to know Buffett while she was working as an analyst for Morgan Stanley. After deciding that he had faith in her telling his story better than anyone else, including himself, not only did Buffett open up a world of files, friends and family to her, he also advised: ?Whenever my version is different from somebody else?s, Alice, use the less flattering version.?

Time and again, he has also departed from the traditional party line of flush folks. On estate tax for example: ?If you eliminate the $20 billions or so raised by the estate tax, you?ve got to make the money up by taxing everyone else somehow?. I don?t like that?. I don?t like anything where the bottom 20% keep getting a poorer and poorer deal.? On derivatives, he has of course been proved scarily right, calling them ticking time bombs that could cause a chain reaction of financial disaster back in 2002. Finally, the man whose life is now a simple composite of one wife, one car and the one house he bought back in 1958, has eschewed his class?s dynastic ways to will most of his fortune to charity.

Most reviews have praised this biography, but they seem to be split on how instructive it is as a financial chronicle. One commentator finds it too full of minutiae, saying that the book tries so hard to be encyclopaedic that it comes across like a Russian novel. Others accuse it of too parsimonious an investment analysis. In the opinion of The Economist, for example, Schroeder should have answered at least the following questions: ?How much of Mr Buffett?s success can be put down to his shrewd use of insurance company funds, or a few stock picks in the 1970s? What is the make-up of his business empire today and how does it differ from the 1980s? Because his insurance companies write policies against catastrophes, how vulnerable is he to the kind of black swan effect described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, such as an earthquake or hurricane that could wipe out his wealth??

Schroeder?s success lies in elaborately illustrating the Buffet method: ?Estimate an investment?s value, handicap its risk, buy using margin of safety, concentrate, stay in circle of competence, let it roll as compounding did the work.? His basic premise is that if you buy companies whose market value is less than their assets, you can still liquidate them profitably if they happen to collapse.

But there is no magic perfection to this method, even with regard to the now legendary Berkshire Hathaway stock. Buffett bought his first 2,000 shares of the company in 1962 at $7.50 a piece, which seemed a good price at the time. But the following years gave him plenty of cause for regret: ?You walk down the street and you see a cigar butt, and it?s kind of soggy and disgusting and repels you, but it?s free?and there may be one puff left in it. Berkshire didn?t have any more puffs?. I would have been better off if I?d never heard of Berkshire Hathaway.? Of course this investment vehicle has since gone on to achieve a valuation in excess of $200 billion.