After years spent declining offers from editors and publishers, Buffett granted unprecedented access to Morgan Stanley executive Alice Schroeder, who is said to have spent approximately two thousand hours interviewing and observing "The Oracle of Omaha". By Sourya Biswas

''Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful'' this advice by legendary investor Warren Buffett has stood the test of time and stock market fluctuations. Amazingly, it was delivered to a group of students at Columbia University, when Buffett was a mere 21 years old. Over the years, this remarkable man from Omaha accumulated a fortune worth more than $60 billion, and even more remarkably, decided to donate most of it.

At this point of a global economic meltdown when centuries-old financial institutions are falling like dominoes and investors are seeing decades of profits wiped out from their portfolios, the publication of a biography of the world's most respected, and by far the richest, investor is especially noteworthy. And to add to the uniqueness of the tome, it is the first authorised biography of Buffett written with the active co-operation of the subject, and reveals unknown facets of his life in surprisingly intimate detail.

The weighty book -  it's 976 pages long - titled ''The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life'' has been written by former Morgan Stanley executive Alice Schroeder and was released on 29 September 2008 by Bantam Books, priced at $35. The title refers to one of Buffett's folksy sayings about success: "Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill," and is an apt description of the manner Buffett accumulated his wealth, starting with delivering newspapers as a young boy.

After years spent declining offers from editors and publishers, Buffett granted unprecedented access to Schroeder, who is said to have spent approximately two thousands hours interviewing and observing the No.2 on Forbes' richest list in his Omaha office and elsewhere. To put this access in perspective: In June last year the chance to have lunch with Buffett fetched $2.1 million at a charity auction won by a Chinese investment fund manager.

Bantam Dell, a division of Random House, won the rights to publish "Snowball" in a reported $7 million deal with Schroeder, one of the biggest book advances on record. The deal puts it close to the $7.1 million General Electric's former chief Jack Welch is said to have received for his memoir and the $10 million-$12 million former US president Bill Clinton banked for his autobiography "My Life."

The publisher describes the publication thus: ''Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as ''The Oracle of Omaha.''

Calling Warren Buffet ''the most fascinating American success story of our time'', Random house says that the unprecedented access given by the billionaire to the author ''was an act of courage'' as it shows the ''mix of strengths and frailties'' in his life, making him out as just another mortal.

The billionaire's life has already been the subject of two specialised books, of which Roger Lowenstein's ''Buffett'' was much appreciated. However, Snowball examines his life at a more personal level than ever before. Schroeder has been quoted as saying that she saw ''the vulnerable side of him…the side of him that leans very heavily on other people for protection and support'' and ''that's a side of Warren Buffett people will see in this book that most people don't know about.''

Buffett, she says, is an ''endless well of neediness'' - a man hungry for affection who can't function without female companionship and who flees anything that might expose him to public criticism. When his first wife left him in 1977, ''he wandered aimlessly around the house, barely able to feed and clothe himself.'' This portrayal is quite contrary to the shrewd-investor image that Buffett that has come to be associated with and ne that may come as a major surprise to readers.

Buffett displayed an entrepreneurial streak right from childhood. By the time he left high school, Buffett had delivered enough newspapers and hatched enough moneymaking ventures to have saved $5,000, or about $53,000 in 2007 dollars, Schroeder writes. He had sold chewing gum, created a racetrack tip sheet and installed pinball machines in barbershops. Yet his grand plan didn't click until he discovered the writings of legendary value investor Benjamin Graham.

Ben Graham is the person whom Buffett considers his guru, and under whose tutelage he spent several fruitful years at the Columbia Business School (after Harvard had rejected him in one of life's delicious ironies). However, Buffett was no blind follower and some of his boldest moves involved breaking Graham's rules.

Schroeder excels at pinpointing other influences on his investing technique. He taught himself how to handicap horses, for example, and the mathematics of insurance intrigued him so much that he considered a career in actuarial science.

Schroeder adroitly weaves history into the background, partly through the life of Buffett's father, a Republican Congressman so conservative that he voted against the Marshall Plan and refused to endorse Dwight D Eisenhower as his party's presidential nominee.

The book then focuses on his investing career, which began to take off in 1956. That's when he gathered $105,000 from four relatives and three close friends to start the Buffett Partnership. Later, the partnership began buying the stock of Berkshire Hathaway, a New England textile firm, for $7 and $8 a share in 1962. After 1969, Berkshire became Buffett's investment vehicle.

Yet the pages are also leavened with a stream of anecdotes, such as the day Buffett met the rock singer Bono. "U2's music doesn't blow me away,'' he said later. "What interests me is that Bono splits the revenue of U2 among four people absolutely equally.''

Many of the anecdotes Schroeder recounts will seem familiar to Buffett fans, but Schroeder adds new details to many of them. Schroeder says she was amazed to learn in her research that many of the familiar Berkshire stories she'd heard before didn't happen exactly the way they're commonly retold today.

Far more interesting for many Buffett fans will be the brutally honest descriptions of the bad investments he has made over the years. He sank money into Berkshire Hathaway, and into Salomon, whose brush with scandal in the early 1990s threatened Buffett's squeaky-clean reputation.

However, what elevates Buffett above several other fabulously rich people is his concern for others less fortunate than him. ''If you're in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent'', he once said, and put his money where his mouth is by announcing the largest ever charitable donation in 2006.

That year he announced that he would gradually give away 85 per cent of his Berkshire holdings to five foundations in annual gifts of stock, starting in July 2006. The largest contribution would go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started by his close friend Bill Gates, perhaps better known as Microsoft founder and richest man in the world.

Recent financial turmoil has been prime hunting season for Buffett, long famed for seeking high-quality investments at bargain prices. On 24 September he agreed to invest as much as $10 billion in Goldman Sachs as part of its capital-raising efforts. (See: Warren Buffett invests $5 billion in Goldman Sachs)
 
On 18 September, Buffett's MidAmerican Energy Co. agreed to acquire Constellation Energy Group for $4.7 billion in cash - a discount of nearly 60 per cent from levels at which the ailing power firm's shares were trading two days prior to the deal. (See: Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy bids $4.7 billion for Constellation Energy) The deal is currently facing a $6.2-billion counter-bid from Europe's largest power producer EDF, backed by private equity firms KKR and TPG

Late last week, a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary said it had acquired a 10-per cent stake in the firm BYD Co., a Chinese producer of rechargeable batteries, electric cars and car parts. (See: Warren Buffett moves into electric car market with $231 million investment in Chinese firm BYD)

In this context, one of his most memorable quotes comes to mind. "I don't have a problem with guilt about money'', Buffett once said. ''The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die."

"The Snowball" is expected to be one of biggest business books of the year. Bantam Dell has printed one million copies. The book is one of six finalists for this year's Financial Times / Goldman Sachs Business Book of Year award.