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, including Wednesday's purchase of a stake in G.E.

A team of Portfolio.com writers, continuing today with senior writer Jesse Eisinger, are reviewing the book in sections this week, and will be commenting on each other's reviews (here are parts one, two, and three, in case you missed them). Readers are invited to add their thoughts in the Comments section.

The New York Times' Janet Maslin has left the world of movie reviewing, and for that we are grateful (she liked The Phantom Menace, for God's sake). Unfortunately, the Times has allowed her to bring her relentless cheer to the book world. Earlier this week, she gave a glowing review to Alice Schroeder's heaping pile of a biography, all 838—960, if you count footnotes and the index—pages of it, of Warren Buffett.

It's called The Snowball. When I first heard the title, I thought, There's not a snowball's chance this will be any good. And it's not, unfortunately. Contra Maslin, Roger Lowenstein's elegant bio, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, is still the definitive volume.

I will second what Felix wrote and what Nelson hinted at. Schroeder was a former analyst on Wall Street and it shows. The book reads as if the editor forgot to edit because he or she was too busy rewriting. Schroeder emptied her notebook and out came a mix of cloying sentiment, irrelevant detail, and occasional perceptive observation. The insights are similar to the kind you glean from a Bob Woodward book—it's all there, but the reader must do the work because the writer isn't drawing the point clearly.

In picking up on Part Five of the book, which is entitled "The King of Wall Street," let me illustrate what I mean with an emblematic passage, the paragraph that begins Chapter 45. It's best to quote in its entirety. If you want to complain about its length, think how you will feel when you are schlepping the entire tome to your in-laws' over Thanksgiving:

"The 1980s would be an era of deals, deals, deals—most financed with debt, debt, debt. The Dow hadn't budged in 17 years. Grinding inflation had decimated corporate profits, yet companies had eiderdowned their payrolls so that every white-collar worker but the lowliest rested on a comfy cushion stuffed with flunkies. Executives treated themselves and their employees to golf courses and hunting lodges. They dribbled away much of their earnings in sloppy operations, loose engineering, and unthinking bureaucracy. By the early 1980s, stocks were on sale like polyester suits. Then, under Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, interest rates, recently an astronomical 15 percent, started to fall as inflation came under control. Astute money men noticed the bloated state of American business. With debt now cheap, would-be buyers of a company could use the company's own assets as collateral for a lender to finance its purchase—like getting a hundred-percent mortgage on a house. They buyer didn't have to put up any cash; it cost no more to buy a huge company than to set up a lemonade stand. A rush of financiers returned to Wall Street, intent on slaughtering the fatted calves using the carving knife of borrowed money. The merger boom had begun."

As the New Yorker would say, block that metaphor!

If I am keeping track, animalistic companies that are simultaneously fat and bloated and stuffed like pillows have both destroyed and dribbled away their earnings so their shares became like cheap clothing that could be carved by hasty butchers, which lead to an explosion. Did I miss anything? And how does borrowed money carve, exactly?

Anyway.

When not mixing metaphors, Schroeder is prone to cutesy wording presumably meant to come off like Buffett's famously folksy phrases. Economists use "bafflemath" to dismiss Buffett's investing genius. As he becomes wealthy in the mid-'80s, Buffett begins to "bump with the biggest elephants" and mingle amongst "hoity-toity sosoity."

Part Five delivers some lengthy tangents. We get plenty about Rose Blumkin, the wily owner of Nebraska Furniture Mart. Rose is already famous to Buffettologists, we don't learn much new. We get a long description of John Gutfreund and Salomon Brothers. Granted, this is an extremely important episode in Buffett's life. And it has new relevance now that Buffett has taken a stake in Goldman Sachs, driving a similarly hard bargain around the same time of the year (Rosh Hashanah). The Salomon investment turns into a major headache for Buffett. But again, Lowenstein's book covered the same ground, doing it better and more economically.

If you pick your way through the book, however, you can find revealing tidbits.

Buffett is regularly depicted as a saint, in this tome and everywhere else in the known universe, but you wouldn't want to have him as your father. Schroeder describes how he bribed his children to lose weight, offering daughter Susie Jr. a month of unlimited spending on clothes if she lost some pounds and kept it off. When she does so, Buffett complains that she spends too much money.

And despite being described as "a likable boss who never lost his temper, never changed his mind capriciously, never said a rude word to anyone, never berated or criticized his employees, didn't second-guess people on their work, and let them do their jobs without interference" you still wouldn't want him as your owner—if you were a little person. He pulls the plug on Berkshire in 1985, the failing textile maker. Suddenly, Schroeder is parsimonious with the description of this episode. In a scant few paragraphs, she describes how many of the employees were in their 50s or older, didn't speak English, and had specialized, non-transferable skills. Some had gone "deaf from the roar of the machines," Schroeder writes. They ask for more severance than their contract calls for, and are given a couple months extra pay, in keeping with Buffett's notorious tightwad ways but in contradiction to his famously progressive politics. The employees ask to meet with him and he says no. Schroeder tries to explain this away by writing, "Probably, he couldn't face them." Maybe. Or maybe he didn't care that much. It was society's responsibility, not his.

The great investor is also prone to a good-for-thee-but-not-for-me attitude about disclosure. He has a minion lobby the Securities and Exchange Commission to allow him to not disclose the finances of Nebraska Furniture Mart after he has purchased it. This is in keeping with his attempts to avoid disclosing his stock purchases with the S.E.C., giving him exemptions that every well-known investor would love to have.

We also get flashes of his brilliance and prescience. Buffett warns about excessive use of portfolio insurance contracts, an early kind of derivative, as early as 1982, writing to Congress about their potential problems. The contracts eventually exacerbate the Crash of 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrials fell 23 percent in a day. That reminds us of his recent prescience about derivatives, which he has called "financial weapons of mass destruction." Buffett forced his newly purchased reinsurance company Gen Re to wind down the derivatives trading group, which had been created to copy A.I.G. Financial Products. That was the very group that ended up taking down the world's biggest insurance company.

Buffett's judgment deserves all the respect we can muster. He largely avoided the stock market bubble of the 1990s. Perhaps he should have sold many of his stocks, which were obviously overvalued, but he avoided getting caught up in the tech boom. In buying Gen Re, he diluted his exposure to the stock market. So far, he has avoided taking pain in the great Credit Bubble of the 2000s. He's just starting to make his moves with Goldman, and Wednesday, with General Electric.

Maybe the problem is that Buffett as a subject has been endlessly picked over. Most people with an even passing interest in the stock market know him and his hamburger-eating, Coke-drinking, deceptively aw-shucks manner.

But few understand the extent of the cult of Buffett. For that, I recommend reading my friend Jeff Matthews' book, Pilgrimage to Warren Buffett's Omaha. Matthews is a hedge fund manager and blogger, and his book is a breezy and perceptive account of Buffett's annual shareholders meeting, shedding light on his investing approach and great judgment. Janet Maslin would like it—but don't hold that against Jeff.