A rare view into the mind of Warren Buffett.
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
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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