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, continuing today with Portfolio.com managing editor Daniel Colarusso, are reviewing the book in sections this week, and will be commenting on each other's reviews (the first part is available here). Readers are invited to add their thoughts in the Comments section.

Part Three of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life takes readers from the early 1950s and his work with Ben Graham and his marriage to Susie through the late 1960s, when he moves to dissolve his own investing partnership. Along the way, his revered father Howard died, he and Susie had three kids of their own, and his wealth grew to $9 million.

Driven by his monastic dedication to the market and amassing wealth, he bought a battered textile maker (Berkshire Hathaway), a troubled retailer, and even dabbled in publishing.

Here are some key passages from the section and our translation and analysis.

On Buffett’s father’s support of Robert Taft in 1952:

[Howard Buffett] broke with the party by refusing to support Eisenhower. This was an act of political suicide…He was left standing on principle—alone. Warren recognized that his father had “painted himself into a corner.” Now Howard’s struggles branded three principles even deeper into his son: that allies are essential; that commitment are so sacred by nature they should be rare; and that grandstanding rarely gets anything done.”

Uh-oh, sounds like the stage is set for revenge. Will young Warren go to New York, make his fortune, and return to Omaha to get even? Well, no. He does go to New York. He does make his fortune. But he’s too busy counting his money to exact revenge on anyone.

On Susie:

“I needed her like crazy. I was happy in my work but I wasn’t happy with myself. She literally saved my life. She resurrected me. She put me together. It was the same kind of unconditional love you would get from a parent.”

Yeesh. It's always about our mothers, isn't it? Even for Buffett. And we thought he was different.

On going to work for Ben Graham:

Warren was so excited about being hired that he arrived in New York on August 1, 1954, and showed up at his new job at Graham-Newman on August 2, a month before his official starting date.

Okay, lemme get this straight. He needed Susie “like crazy” but skipped town a month early to pore over S&P stock guides? 

On how Buffett decided to buy shares of bus company Union Street Railway in the mid-1950s:

“I got up at about 4 a.m. and drove to New Bedford. [C.E.O.] Mark Duff was very nice, polite. Just as I was ready to leave, he said, ‘By the way, we’re been thinking of having a return of capital distribution to shareholders.’ That meant they were going to give back the extra money. “And I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ And then he said, ‘Yes and there’s a provision you may not be aware of…that you have to do it in multiples of the par value of the stock. The stock had a $25 par value so that meant it would be paying out at least $25 per share.
And I said, ‘Well, that’s a good start.’ Then he said, ‘Bear in mind, we’re thinking of using two units.’ That meant they were going to declare a fifty-dollar dividend on a stock that was selling at thirty-five or forty dollars at that time.”
So if you bought a share you got all your money back right away and then some. And afterward, you still owned the slice of the business represented by your share of stock…I’ll never know whether my trip up there precipitated that [offer] or not.

Okay, give the guy credit. He worked hard when he was young to get the real story from companies in a time when there was no Internet, and not even a CNBC. And he was smart and charming enough to get what he wanted without being a bully.

On how Susie discovered how rich she and Warren were getting:

[Neighbor] Madeline [Sullivan] rushed down to the Buffett apartment and found Susie distraught. She had accidentally thrown a batch of dividend checks that had been sitting on Warren’s desk into the apartment’s incinerator chute, which led straight down to the building’s furnace…Sure enough the incinerator was cold…When they found the checks, Madeline’s eyes grew wide. They were for as much as thousands of dollars, not $25 or $10 as she had assumed.

Lucy!!! What have you done now?!?!

On Buffett’s immaturity:

Despite his brilliance, Warren was still very immature. For Susie, his helplessness at home meant that he was like having a third child to care for…During meals and parties at home, he often fled small talk by leaving the table to go upstairs. But unlike Ben Graham, he was not upstairs reading Proust, he was working. As for Susie, she knew little and cared less about what Warren did. “I used to write security analyst for his job, and people thought he checked burglar alarms.”

Well, maybe if Buffett had been home more, eldest son Howie wouldn’t have been making the family dog Scout jump off the roof and break a leg (seriously—it’s on page 295).

On meeting Charlie Munger, his longtime partner:

Before long the two men were talking simultaneously, yet they seemed to understand each other perfectly.

A soulmate, at last.

On why getting Buffett mad is not a good idea:

Sanborn’s board consisted almost entirely of insurance company representatives—its biggest customers—so it operated more like a club than a business, except the board meeting wasn’t followed my a round of golf…At [Buffett’s first meeting as a board member in 1959], Warren proposed that the company distribute the investments to the shareholders. But since the Depression and World War II, American businesses treated money as a scarce commodity to be hoarded and husbanded…The board responded to the idea of separating the investment portfolio from the map business as preposterous.
Then, toward the end of the meeting, the board broke out the humidor and passed around cigars. While they smoked, Warren sat fuming. “That’s my money paying for those cigars,” he thought.
On the way back to the airport, he took pictures of his children out of his wallet and looked at them to bring his blood pressure down. Frustrated, Warren decided that he would take the company away from Sanborn’s undeserving board on behalf of the other shareholders.

Ah, there’s the revenge play we were looking for earlier. Wealth plus intelligence plus righteous indignation=danger for Buffett’s rivals.

On Susie’s spending habits:

[Susie’s] real focus was on having a home of her own at last…she redid the house in cheery contemporary style, with chrome and leather furniture and huge, bright modern paintings covering the white walls. The $15,000 decorating bill totaled almost half of what the house itself cost, which “just about killed Warren.”

Well, maybe it’s best he wasn’t checking burglar alarms for a living after all—an alarm checker would never have been able to afford that.