The Snowball, the first authorized biography of Warren Buffett, has been one of the most eagerly anticipated business books of the year. Published on Monday, the book is particularly timely because of Buffett's role in the credit crisis now roiling Wall Street.

A team of Portfolio.com writers, starting today with finance blogger Felix Salmon, are reviewing the book in sections over the next five days, and will be commenting on each other's reviews. Readers are invited to add their thoughts in the Comments section.

Warren Buffett is a great value investor—which means that he's a lucky value investor, something he himself readily admits. He found himself in the right place at the right time, blessed with a skill set and self-confidence which allowed him to become the richest man in the world, a title of which he was very proud.

But Buffett didn't reach those heady heights just by investing his money wisely. He needed more money than just his own, and he was good at finding O.P.M. (other people's money) in many different places.

Sometimes he would raise it by persuading people to give him their money to invest on their behalf. Sometimes he would borrow it—although that kind of leverage, debt finance, has never been particularly appealing to Buffett.

Instead, Buffett's biggest source of O.P.M. came from the most leveraged industry the world has ever invented: insurance.

One of the central ironies of insurance is that an industry predicated on safety has at its heart so much risk. Insurance premiums are essentially interest-free loans from the insured to the insurer, carrying an unknown maturity and an unknown principal amount.

With most loans, you have to pay back only the amount you borrowed; with insurance premiums, you might pay back hundreds of times that sum, if you (or, more to the point, the insured) are particularly unlucky.

When an investor buys an insurance company, then, he turns it into something of a race against time. He takes in premiums, and then invests them in the market, with the hope that his investment returns will be so great that by the time the claims come in, the premiums will more than cover them. If his investment returns are big enough, he can bring down the price of the insurance he's selling, thereby selling even more of it and having ever more money to invest.

It's a dangerous game, and it's prone to blowing up—as most investment companies do, sooner or later. Sometimes they're wiped out by a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, where many large claims suddenly appear at once. At other times, the catastrophe is financial: A.I.G. Financial Products, for instance, brought down not only itself but also its parent by insuring complex debt instruments against default.

Buffett, like A.I.G.F.P., plays large-stakes games in the financial markets. In 2007, he took in an astonishing $4.5 billion by selling long-dated stock-index put options. He got a huge amount of money to play with, probably forever—but if certain indices perform very badly over the next 11 to 19 years, then he could find himself with a truly monster obligation down the road.

Indeed, when academic types talk about the proverbial Capital Decimation Partners—a hedge fund that looks as if it's getting strong but not excessive returns, and then one day implodes—the model they generally use is one where the fund does nothing but sell puts.

Obviously, Buffett does many things other than selling puts. His businesses are diversified across many different industries. But there's one thing they all have in common: they throw off substantial amounts of cash, which Buffett can then reinvest.

Author Alice Schroeder calls this the "snowball": you put money into a company, which generates more money, which you add to the snowball, generating more money still. Any time you take money out of the snowball, you're denying yourself much more than that sum in future gains. Buffett likes to say that when he lost $2,000 buying a gas station in the early 1950s, he really lost the $6 billion that money would otherwise have become.

But big simple ideas like these are not easy to find amidst the suffocating mass of detail in Schroeder's book. Like many biographies, it starts off with something eye-catching and juicy before jumping back to ancestors and heritage; Schroeder decided that her centerpiece for Part One of the book would be a scene at Sun Valley in 1999 where Buffett confronted the tech titans with their bubblicious stocks.

Buffett's talk at Sun Valley was quite simple. He said, basically, that tech stocks were overpriced. Many other people were saying that, too, and most people, even at Sun Valley, knew it, in their hearts, to be true. Why did Schroeder decide to lead with this talk, rather than any of Buffett's decisions in and around his life's great achievement, Berkshire Hathaway? It's far from clear. And it's a most frustrating chapter to read, too: because you never know quite why Schroeder is leading with this, or that the whole point of the chapter is nothing but a speech, you keep on picking up on detail which sounds like foreshadowing but isn't.

Why, for instance, does Schroeder spend the first two pages of the chapter talking about Buffett's flight in to Sun Valley? How can you read a passage like this and not think that it's serving some kind of purpose?

Sometime later, the G-IV crossed the Snake River Plain and approached the Sawtooth Mountains, a vast Cretaceous upheaval of dark and ancient granite mounds baking in the summer sun. It sailed through the bright clear air into the Wood River Valley, descending to eight thousand feet, where it started to buck on the mountain wave of turbulence thrown into the sky by the brown foothills beneath. Buffett read on, unperturbed, as the plane rocked and his family jerked about in their seats...

I was convinced we were about to have a bloody plane crash; instead, the plane is uneventfully met at the airport by Herb Allen's Sun Valley minions, and nothing is ever heard about it again. The same thing happens when Schroeder starts talking pointedly about the "very, very attractive" babysitters laid on by Allen—but again, nothing comes of it. All we get is a speech, decorated by flowers which, Schroeder says, Buffett doesn't even notice: "scarlet petunias and blue sage"; "pastel lupines and sapphire delphiniums towering over poppies and Indian paintbrush, crisp blue salvia and veronica nestled among the stonecrop and hens-and-chicks."

In other words, this is a book which doesn't just make it hard to make out the forest for the trees; it makes it hard to make out the trees for the texture of their bark and the exact shape and number of their branches.

I have no idea why Schroeder felt the need to lard the book with so much pointless detail, but if the first two parts of the book are any indication, it might be because she's so hesitant about inserting her own analysis or ideas about the bigger picture.

In general I'm a fan of the show-don't-tell school of writing, but this is a very smart woman who has spent five years intimately involved with Buffett, his friends, his family, and his business partners. We could be forgiven for wanting to know what she thinks of him.

Yet for a woman who's happy to spend two pages on a completely irrelevant plane journey, Schroeder seems to be very good at completely missing some of the big issues. For instance, Buffett had one thing in common with the technology gurus to whom he gave his speech at Sun Valley, and which he doesn't have in common with the founders of most other companies: he never pays dividends.

This decision makes valuing Berkshire Hathaway stock more difficult than it needs to be. Remember that according to financial theory, the value of a stock is just the net present value of all future dividends.

While tech companies that don't pay dividends are very common, industrial companies with strong cash flows and strong profits almost always pay dividends. Berkshire Hathaway, which has only ever paid one dividend in its entire existence—10 cents, in 1967—is far the biggest exception, and yet Schroeder doesn't seem to spend much time exploring this issue.

Buffett's no-dividends decision means that anybody who's made a lot of money from investing in Berkshire Hathaway stock falls into one of two camps. Either they sold their stock—a betrayal of everything Buffett stands for—or else they're sitting only on paper gains. And remember that Buffett's most cherished shareholders are the ones holding one or two or maybe three A shares worth well over $100,000 apiece. They can't sell 3 percent of their stockholding to get a little income: that's a necessary consequence of having shares with such enormous face value.

Schroeder gives Buffett's dividend policy just one paragraph, among her hundreds of pages. And there, she treats it as something which is clearly and obviously correct:

Feeling flush during what would turn out to be a brief moment of financial success—"we were selling out of Rayon linings for a few months and making a lot of money"—Buffett had let himself get talked into a ten-cent-per-share dividend. The firm's lawyers had argued that Berkshire was doing so well that it might be accused of unjustifiably retaining earnings. Either while daydreaming or simply in a moment of weakness, Buffett went along with the distibution; a dime a share sounded measly; it somehow took him 24 hours to realize the fallacy of their argument. By then it was too late and his uncharacteristic agreeableness had showered on the partners and shareholders $101,733 that he knew he could have turned into millions someday. He would never make a mistake like that again.

But of course it's not as simple as that. If Buffett implemented a dividend, he could set up a check-the-box option where it was automatically reinvested into the company—a "scrip dividend," it's called in Britain, which essentially involves paying the dividend in equity rather than cash. Investors could then easily keep all their money invested in Berkshire Hathaway, just as they do now—but they'd also have the option of taking some cash money out now and then, which might be very welcome.

Instead, Warren knows best: No matter what their domestic financial position, his shareholders should entrust him not only with their initial investment but also with all of the profits which accrue from that investment.

This is consistent with Buffett's own lifestyle. He takes a modest salary and keeps the vast majority of his wealth in Berkshire stock where it won't ever be spent, just used as an incredibly valuable scorecard in the world's-richest-man stakes.

It's worth noting that somehow he's persuaded the compilers of such lists that all of that stock should be assigned to him, even after he gave most of it away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities. Buffett is one man who really can both give his money away and keep it, at the same time.

But not everybody is like Buffett, as this book makes abundantly clear. Buffett was making thousands of dollars on paper rounds before he even got to high school, a huge sum, in the early 1940s. He bought his first stock in sixth grade.

He never concentrated half as much on his studies as he did on making money. While his peers were socializing, he was very much the precocious businessman, even in his early teens. And, of course, he was extremely smart, blessed with a prodigious and photographic memory, and had both an aptitude and willingness to read thousands of pages of financial reports for fun—even on his honeymoon.

Clearly, Buffett was always an extreme outlier. But the ultra-close-up nature of this book makes that hard to get into any perspective, and the only fun that the prose offers is the fact that it occasionally veers away from its one-thing-after-another chronology into infelicities and self-contradictions. What, for instance, does this mean?

In private, Munger tended to lecture either himself or his audience, making conversations with him like sitting in the back of a runaway stagecoach.

And surely "lessened", here, should be "lengthened:"

[Buffet's mother] Leila formed a much healthier relationship with her youngest child, Bertie, as the intervals between her rages lessened.

Or consider this: On page 137, in 1950, while a student at Columbia University, Buffett buys 350 shares of Geico. On page 165, in 1951 (you can see how this book grows to over 900 pages), Buffett's still buying Geico—as much as he can—in order to achieve his ambition of eventually owning 175 shares.

But the real problem with this book is that Schroeder never gets inside Buffett; never explains what he's thinking, instead making do with simply telling us what he's doing. Consider that first investment in Geico:

Geico seemed to Warren a no-lose proposition. That Monday, less than 48 hours after he arrived back in New York, Warren dumped stocks worth three-quarters of his growing portfolio and used the cash to buy 350 shares of Geico. It was an extraordinary move for the normally cautious young man.

Schroeder proceeds to give us a potted analysis of why Buffett thought Geico was cheap. What she never even attempts to explain is the much bigger question of why Buffett was so eager to place so many of his eggs in one basket. It's a typical omission: Whenever we need her to explain what's really going on, she goes AWOL.

Maybe things will improve in the later parts of the book, after Buffett sets up shop on his own—I'm only up to the end of Part Two, where Buffett has graduated from college, taken a stockbroking job with his father, and married a girl in the wake of what seems for all the world to be the most romance-free courtship of all time. Not that Schroeder is willing to hazard anything much on that front, either.

If you're obsessed with Everything Buffett, I'm sure you've gone out and started devouring this book already, and it doesn't matter what I say. But if you're someone who doesn't own shares in Berkshire Hathaway, or if you have only a passing interest in the man, I'm sure there are more productive uses of your time than plowing your way through 900 pages of Schroeder's uninspiring prose.

For starters, you could try reading past issues of Buffett's legendary letter to shareholders, which accompanies every Berkshire Hathaway annual report. It's much more interesting, and much better written, than just about anything in this book.