In The Snowball we don't learn anything about how Buffett dealt with the pressures and stress of the General Re investigations. To be fair, the hands of the author, Alice Schroeder, were tied: She notes that she testified in the criminal case in her capacity as a former insurance industry analyst, and is under subpoena in the lawsuit that was brought by Eliot Spitzer, then the New York attorney general, against Greenberg.

Still, it is a big hole that future biographies will have to fill.

By the end of the book and 2008, however, Buffett is vindicated. He had overcome personal losses and any lingering doubts about his investing style or leadership.

The bubble in tech stocks had burst, as he had warned at Sun Valley in 1999. Shares of Coca-Cola recovered under a new chief executive, Neville Isdell, and even General Re straightened out.

More important, the evolution of Buffett into wise old man and celebrity was complete by 2008.

This is a phenomena that deserves closer examination.

Schroeder does capture Buffett's rock-star aura, especially in describing the Woodstock of capitalism that takes place every year at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha. (For me, the most surprising revelation in the book is that one year a number of attendees engaged in pirate capitalism, shoplifting various Berkshire Hathaway products on display.)

Buffett even gets to hobnob with rock stars, like Bono of U2 ("U2's music doesn't blow me away," Buffett tells the author. "What interests me is that Bono splits the revenue of U2 among four people absolutely equally.")

But Schroeder fails to dig deeper to explain why Buffett strikes a chord in such a way that other celebrity C.E.O.'s do not. At the same time, many who eat up what Buffett has to say seem to do so without carefully following his principles or putting in a fraction of the focus and work that he does.

The "less flattering" reason, according to Schroeder:

"What people paid attention to was simply how rich he was. Indeed, as much as he wanted them to study his model, Buffett sometimes inadvertently discouraged it; he also wanted people to believe that he tap-danced into work every day and had fun."

It is difficult at times to get past the incredible wealth and the shtick—the Cherry Cokes and corny jokes and aw-shucks air that seem like throwbacks to a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950s (Warren Knows Best, perhaps?).

But that persona has obscured what is Warren Buffett's most important legacy. During an era when Davos attendees babble about globalization, eyeballs, or structured investments, Buffett has been one of the few executives who have spoken about the responsibility of the wealthy to society.

He has protested against Republican efforts to eliminate the estate tax, and spoken out about a tax system that is unfairly skewed to benefit the ultra-wealthy. In philanthropy, he has eschewed ego and decided to give the bulk of his vast wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

"All along, I've felt that the money was just claim checks that should go back into society," Buffett says in The Snowball.

While other C.E.O.'s have put shareholders' money at risk to chase the latest fad while awarding themselves huge pay packages, Buffett has long espoused a sensible conservatism.

He opposed the awarding of stock options at a time when Silicon Valley insisted they were essential to running a tech company.

And Buffett warned against the use of derivatives, calling them "financial weapons of mass destruction" when Alan Greenspan and others were hailing them for helping to spread risk.

The Snowball ends with the current financial crisis erupting. While the book does not make this argument explicitly, if there had more than one Warren Buffett in the last decade, we might not be in such dire straits today.