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 senior editor Nelson Wang, are reviewing the book in sections this week, and will be commenting on each other's reviews (here are the first and second parts). Readers are invited to add their thoughts in the Comments section.

Part Four of The Snowball is entitled "Susie Sings" and covers the 1970s, when Buffett began packing the snowball that was Berkshire Hathaway, larding it with See's Candies, Sun Newspapers, Geico, the Buffalo Evening News, and a stake in the Washington Post.
 
It's roughly the period when Warren Buffett really became Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, largely as a result of a glowing chapter devoted to him and Ben Graham in Supermoney, a bestselling book by Adam Smith about the 1960s stock market bubble.

It's also when Buffett befriended Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, a woman with a mass of insecurities despite her wealth and status. Buffett's close and mutually beneficial friendship with Graham—he gave her emotional support and business advice, while she gave him entrée to high society and a whole host of power players—inevitably created tensions with Buffett's wife, Susie, who had embarked on a singing career at this point.

(Susie reportedly sent Graham a letter giving her permission to pursue a relationship with her husband, which Graham showed to friends, an anecdote that was first told in Roger Lowenstein's earlier book on the subject, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, but no more detail than that is given here.)

Significantly, this was a period when Buffett's own fame and reputation helped him amass even more money by winning him audiences with powerful people and also because people were willing to offer him better deals than they would anyone else, simply because being able to say you had Warren Buffett as an investor was becoming extremely valuable.

This dynamic obviously endures to this day, with Buffett recently being able to grab a chunk of Goldman Sachs on what some might call extortionate terms. Indeed, the Journal has calculated that Buffett already has a huge potential paper profit on his investment after just five trading days.

But Buffett's obsessive focus on his work and infatuation with Graham took its toll on his marriage, and Susie eventually decamped from Omaha for San Francisco, although the two never divorced. Susie's well-intentioned request that her friend Astrid Menks, who worked in a restaurant in Omaha, check in on Buffett turned into something quite unexpected—at least for Susie—when Menks and Buffett eventually started a romantic relationship. (Buffett wound up marrying Menks in 2004 when Susie died.)

(As an aside, there's a somewhat bizarre section here where Buffett relates his eating likes and dislikes:

"Broccoli, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts look to me like Chinese food crawling around on a plate. Cauliflower almost makes me sick…I don't even want to be close to a rhubarb, it makes me retch... I like eating the same thing over and over and over again. I could eat a ham sandwich every day for 50 days in a row for breakfast.")

Overall, I'm enjoying The Snowball a lot more than I had initially. There's still a morass of detail to sift through, but it's not as pointless as it was earlier in the book, as Felix pointed out. Part of the reason why this section was more interesting to me was that the subjects were often media-related: Buffett's investment in the Washington Post and his part in the Sun's exposé of the Boys Town finances. In the latter, Buffett almost played the role of a forensic accountant, and the resulting stories, which netted the Sun a Pulitzer Prize, are something which I hadn't known that much about.

But I think part of the reason is thematic as well. In this section, you really start to get a feel for how Buffett's philosophy and obsessive interests inform his decisions in both his investments and his personal life, driving the growth of Berkshire Hathaway. That snowball has the distinct makings of an avalanche now.