Except for lunch with Haiwen and a brief detour through a bunch of Chelsea art galleries, yesterday was Buffett Day, as I read through the 2004 annual report of Berkshire Hathaway and Roger Lowenstein's brilliant Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, which probably ranks among the four or five best business books I've read. (I was planning on reading Lowenstein's book anyway, and was more than halfway through before I realized that Berkshire's latest annual report had just been released that day, which has to be some sort of meaningful coincidence.) Anyway, Buffett strikes me as an ideal book for readers who are interested in learning what investing is all about, even if Lowenstein is a bit too harsh on index funds. (Even Buffett maintains that a diversified index fund is the best way for most people to invest.) Lowenstein's book is also notable for the theory that Buffett's success has been driven by his obsessive fear of death:

Still again, when a shareholder asked what his goal was, now that he had become the richest man in the country, Buffett spit out, "To become the oldest one."

I love that story. The most interesting Buffett news of recent weeks, however, is that Eliot Spitzer has supoenaed Buffett (or his company, anyway) in an investigation of whether one of Berkshire's subsidiaries used exotic insurance products to disguise debt for another firm. Obviously, as a tiny Berkshire shareholder, I hope that the investigation doesn't turn up any wrongdoing. Still, the prospect of a courtroom exchange betweeen Spitzer and Buffett, who belong on any list of the four or five smartest, most ambitious guys in the country, is rather enticing. If Buffett and Spitzer both show up, this could be the most interesting courtroom encounter since, say, Inherit the Wind.