I can’t doubt that many of you are already reading it, but by all means treat yourself to Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam, 960 pps. but "only" 838 of actual text, $35). I’m relieved to report that all the major worries one had in contemplating this biography—that its "authorized" status might lead to the obscuring of Buffett’s rather odd personal life; that Schroeder, a securities analyst rather than a writer, might bury us in financial detail—prove groundless.

Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that Schroeder (under the prodding of the publisher, no doubt) actually went too far in the other direction. I’m not sure, for example, that I needed to know that, at some annual celebrity-studded get-together, Buffett and the late, lamented film director Sydney Pollack always sang "The Hut Sut Song," but I would have loved to know more about how Buffett thought he could get a takeover of the dying Long-Term Capital Management’s portfolio to work.

Thus, do not read this book exclusively or even primarily for the financial/analytical aspect, but for the man in full. Charlie Munger, who should know if anyone does, has remarked that as he ages Buffett seems to get sharper, smarter, even more focused and even more energetic. This is especially comforting to a reviewer who has just turned 65, but it is also a commentary on how the profession you and I have chosen allows us to get better and smarter deep into our lives. For all these ideas and countless more, The Snowball is simply a must-read.

Also in the must-read category is Charles Ellis’s massive The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (Penguin, 731 pps. but "only" 685 of text, $37.95). This is a richly detailed, scrupulously researched history of one of the most enduringly successful financial firms of all time, and it simply demands to be read. As much as a true history of American and then global finance, it is the exploration of a culture, and of its "wide, deep and continuous collective determination to excel." In the end, it is that abiding commitment to excellence which the reader takes away from this important book.

I picked up with no little trepidation Michael Lewis’s compilation of essays, op-ed pieces, book excerpts and other snippets, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (Norton, 391 pps., $27.95). Lewis is one of those guys who’s so smart, and so successful, that he cannot help thinking himself much smarter than he really is. (This affliction is even now mowing down a whole generation of mortgage-backed securities traders and their clueless superiors.) One result is that this pastiche is no "story" at all, but merely contemporary observations on four of the last five great financial and market crackups: the Crash of 1987; the Russia default/Asian Contagion 2/Long-Term Capital Management cataclysm of 1998; the dot.com bubble and its thermonuclear implosion; and the current unpleasantness up through the beginning of 2008, with the obvious limitations thereof. (He skips the great debacle of 1990-91 for reasons known only to himself, his publisher and heaven.)

And yet this book has its uses for the busy advisor, because there’s a lot of good, if necessarily anecdotal, background information in it (as well as a fair amount of silliness and dross, from pinheads like Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs). If you haven’t had time to read—and aren’t likely soon to find time to read—John Cassidy’s Dot.con, or Roger Lowenstein’s wonderful When Genius Failed, or even Lewis’s own (quite good) The New New Thing, you can mine a fair amount of perspective from Panic. (My own favorite piece—and I freely acknowledge the unworthiness of this—is Lewis’s January 1999 postmortem on LTCM, which is demonstrative of nothing more than how completely taken in Lewis was and continued to be by John Meriwether, with whom he had worked at Salomon Brothers.) Worth a good look; just pick your spots.