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Of Permanent Value
Book

Of Permanent Value

The Story of Warren Buffett

Andrew Kilpatrick
McGraw-Hill, 1998
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Eloquent
  • Engaging

Recommendation

Andrew Kilpatrick has written a most unusual biography of one of the world’s richest men, investor Warren Buffett. Instead of the dry chronology presented in most biographies, Kilpatrick has stuffed his 890 pages with 157 immensely readable, personal and professional vignettes. They are arranged in no particular order, yet they add up to a detailed and satisfying journey. Filled with plenty of inside detail from numerous original and published sources, the book lets you pull up a comfy chair inside Warren Buffett’s brain. getabstract.com recommends this book to anyone interested in investing and general business, and to curious readers of all persuasions.

Summary

Warren Buffet’s Early Years

Warren Buffett jokes that he "was conceived during the stock market crash" in the fall of 1929. To add to the irony, his father was a stock salesman at the time. Young Warren’s future could have been predicted by looking at one of his first and favorite toys: a metal moneychanger he wore strapped around his waist. The little boy walked around making change. He was fascinated by this and by keeping track of money. "Making math calculations, particularly when it concerned compounding money at a blistering pace... absorbed him from his earliest days."

As a child, his first business was peddling Coca-Cola fitting for a fellow who would one day own billions of dollars of Coca-Cola stock. When little Warren was six years old, he came up with the idea of taking a 25-cent six pack of Coke and selling the drinks individually for five cents a bottle. "Those 20% returns were about consistent with Buffett’s entire business career. And that’s why he’s a multi-billionaire."

Buffett grew up in Omaha, with the exception of spending his teen years in Washington, D.C., after his father was elected to Congress in 1942, and lives there today. He still...

About the Author

Andrew Kilpatrick self-published the first edition of this book in 1994. He updated and expanded it for the 1998 McGraw-Hill edition. He served in the Peace Corps, was a U.S. Naval officer, and spent 20 years as a newspaperman in Birmingham, Alabama.

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