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.