Of Permanent Value — The Story of Warren Buffett

The Most Complete Buffett Record Ever Assembled

Andrew Kilpatrick, a Birmingham News journalist and Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, set out to write the most thorough account of Warren Buffett’s life ever assembled—and by sheer volume of research, he succeeded. Of Permanent Value runs to well over 700 pages and has been revised and expanded across multiple editions since it first appeared in 1994, making it a continuously updated chronicle rather than a fixed historical snapshot. The book covers Buffett’s childhood in Depression-era Omaha, his early fascination with numbers and business, his studies under Benjamin Graham at Columbia, the formation of his investment partnerships, and the decades-long transformation of Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling New England textile manufacturer into one of the world’s most valuable companies. Kilpatrick leaves few stones unturned: the book is dense with specific financial figures, anecdotes from people who knew Buffett at various stages of his life, and granular detail about Berkshire’s subsidiary companies and investment positions. For readers who want to know everything, this is the place to look.

A Reference Work More Than a Narrative Biography

The book’s defining characteristic—its exhaustive comprehensiveness—is also what limits its appeal as a reading experience. Kilpatrick organizes his material thematically and chronologically in a way that privileges accumulation of information over storytelling momentum. Chapters pile detail upon detail without always connecting events to broader patterns or consequences, and the sheer density of facts can make it difficult to maintain a sense of where the narrative is going. Readers who approach Of Permanent Value looking for the propulsive narrative of, say, Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball will be disappointed. But readers who use it the way a scholar uses a reference text—dipping in by topic, cross-referencing years, using the index to track specific investments or relationships—will find it invaluable. The multiple updated editions are a genuine asset, because Buffett’s story is ongoing, and most biographies become frozen artifacts the moment they go to press.

Admiring but Informative

Kilpatrick makes no pretense of objectivity. He is clearly a Buffett admirer, and the book’s tone is consistently celebratory. This is worth flagging for readers expecting rigorous critical analysis of Buffett’s record or character. Mistakes, controversies, and business decisions that did not work out tend to receive cursory treatment compared to the extended praise given to successes. Yet within those limits, the book delivers remarkable value. The sheer quantity of primary material—quotes, financial data, and firsthand accounts—means readers can form their own judgments even when Kilpatrick declines to offer criticism. As the most detailed single-volume Buffett reference available, Of Permanent Value earns a place on the shelf of anyone seriously engaged with the Berkshire story, even if other books serve better as introductions.

The Berkshire Story It Documents

The reason a book this long can sustain a reader’s interest at all is the inherent drama of the material. Kilpatrick chronicles a genuinely remarkable arc: a boy delivering newspapers and tracking pinball routes in Omaha; a Columbia student who became the favourite pupil of Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing; a young partnership manager who quietly compounded his investors’ money at extraordinary rates through the 1950s and 1960s; and finally the architect who turned a doomed New England textile mill—Berkshire Hathaway—into a holding company for insurance float and a portfolio of wholly owned businesses and public stocks. The book is dense with the specific episodes that have become Buffett legend: the acquisition of National Indemnity and See’s Candies, the long partnership with Charlie Munger, the salvage of Salomon Brothers during its Treasury-auction scandal, the contrarian moves during market panics. Because Kilpatrick updated the work repeatedly across editions, it captures this story as a moving target rather than a closed chapter, recording Berkshire’s growth and Buffett’s evolving thinking edition by edition in a way that fixed biographies cannot.

How It Compares and Who It Is For

For most readers approaching Buffett for the first time, the better starting points are Alice Schroeder’s authorised, narratively propulsive The Snowball or Roger Lowenstein’s elegant Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, both of which deliver the life as a shaped story rather than an accumulation of data. Where Of Permanent Value earns its place is as the reference text the others are not: the book a serious student of Berkshire reaches for when checking a specific acquisition, a particular year’s results, or the precise wording of a Buffett aphorism. It is best used non-linearly—consulted by topic, navigated through its index, dipped into rather than read straight through—and readers comfortable with that approach will find a depth of detail unmatched anywhere else in a single volume. Investors drawn to the value-investing tradition will also appreciate how thoroughly the book grounds Buffett’s methods in Graham’s principles and in decades of practice, even if Kilpatrick’s admiration means the reader must supply the critical distance the author declines to provide. As a labour of devotion by a shareholder-journalist who clearly loves his subject, it is both the book’s limitation and its enduring usefulness.

A Distinctive Publishing History

Part of what makes Of Permanent Value unusual is the way it came into being and stayed in print. Rather than relying on a major trade publisher to shepherd a tidy, marketable life story, Kilpatrick pursued completeness above all and issued the work through his own imprint across successive expanded editions, some running well beyond a thousand pages. That self-directed approach is the source of both the book’s sprawl and its singular value: free from the length constraints and narrative discipline a commercial editor would impose, Kilpatrick could keep everything in—the minor anecdotes, the granular financial figures, the firsthand recollections that a more conventional biography would cut. For the dedicated Berkshire follower, that maximalism is precisely the appeal, and it explains why the book has retained a loyal readership among shareholders and value investors even as more polished biographies have come and gone.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — The definitive encyclopedic reference on Warren Buffett, best approached as a research resource rather than a narrative to read straight through.