Review by Booklist Review
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest philanthropic enterprise in history, with current reserves exceeding $70 billion. It came into existence due to the shared vision of two of history's wealthiest individuals, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who crossed paths at a party in 1991. The two men connected instantly and began a strong, long-lasting friendship based on similarly driven personalities and deep mutual respect. In alternating sections, McCarten (Darkest Hour, 2017) offers insightful profiles of both men and the dynasties they built, with extensive biographical detail, accessible financial analysis, inside looks at tech superpowers, and pointers on how to run and guarantee the future of a multibillion-dollar organization. McCarten continuously emphasizes the profound influence the women in both men's lives (mothers, wives, girlfriends) had on shaping their worldviews. His coverage ranges from well-documented public events to private family minutiae, chronicling both successes and failures, good press and bad. Originally conceived as a play, the text also includes McCarten's speculation and musings, always identified as such. This results in a thoroughly engaging tale, especially as McCarten summarizes current contradictions and inconsistencies inherent within modern-day largesse. This fact-based and balanced account makes for a great read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Screenwriter McCarten (The Two Popes) struggles to stick to the facts in this unsatisfying dual biography focused on the friendship between investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. The book's greatest strengths and weaknesses can be traced back to its origins as an unfinished stage play. It's easy to imagine how McCarten's fly-on-the-wall account of Buffet and Gates's first meeting, which takes place at a 1991 garden party hosted by Gates's mother, would have played out onstage. Gates, contemptuous of Buffet for trading "pieces of paper" instead of creating innovative products, grumps about until Buffet asks him how he would have built IBM from scratch, kicking off a legendary nerding-out session. Unfortunately, even McCarten's thorough research strains to support this level of novelistic detail, resulting in speculative passages about what Buffet felt as he sat beside his wife's deathbed in 2004 and what Melinda French thought of her now ex-husband when they first met at a corporate dinner. McCarten also strains to fulfill his goal of elucidating what the duo's "giga-wealthy partnership mean for the rest of us," delving into how the pair accumulated massive riches and established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation without making clear the effects of such actions on ordinary people. This falls short of its grand ambitions. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An account of a friendship among moguls that has led to world-changing efforts--for better or worse. "This book is about a friendship, one of the most impactful friendships of modern times," writes filmmaker, novelist, and biographer McCarten. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates met in 1991, bonded over bridge and golf, and learned about each other's business. In time, with Gates' then-wife Melinda, they became the sole trustees of a foundation with more than $70 billion in assets. The author writes fluently about the origins of the Buffett and Gates fortunes: Buffett by investing in unsexy stocks with small returns that added up in the aggregate, Gates by founding Microsoft and, to some extent, monopolizing the personal computer market. Both made billions, for a time trading the world's-richest-person title--and McCarten is helpful in explaining just what that means, likening the average American's wealth to a grain of sand compared to their Moon-sized fortunes. As Steinbeck said, the ultra-rich spend two-thirds of their lives greedily seizing every cent they can only to spend the last third giving it away, and Gates and Buffett have poured billions of dollars into such social goods as family planning, access to abortion, women's education, agricultural reform, and, most recently, Covid-19 research and medical delivery. (For this, strangely, Gates has become a QAnon trope of evil, while Buffett has gone largely unchallenged.) Throughout, McCarten raises critical questions about the wisdom of allowing individuals so much economic power--Gates may have given away billions, but "he was still a plutocrat holed up in his dream house, staring at yeomen tossed about on stormy seas"--suggesting that, for all the foundation's good deeds, we need more discussion "about the role we want big money to play in our lives." A lucid biography that subtly questions the role of private philanthropy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
