I Would Prefer Not To - (#2)
A quarterly miscellany of essays by Richard Dooling and news about his upcoming books. Subscribe here.
The Warren Buffett Issue
Happy Spring
First, a week ago Warren Buffett announced that he will be stepping down from his job as the top dog at Berkshire Hathaway. I gathered links to four New York Times opinion pieces I've written about Buffett over the years. He is a first-class wit and fun to write about.
Second, the jacket blurb for my new novella, Send the Dead, which will be published on 19 October 2025.
Third, I'll share what I've enjoyed reading lately.
A Warren Buffett Retrospective
I live in Montana now, but I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, home to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. I spent over half of my writing life in Nebraska, and every so often, somebody from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would email and ask me to write about Buffett or the annual Berkshire Hathaway Convention in Omaha. I never passed up the chance.
These New York Times share links should work for 14 days. If you get a paywall, let me know, and I'll either get a new set of links or post a copy of the essay at dooling.com.
Please forward this email to any Buffett fans.
The Rise of the Machines
This short essay is probably my best opinion piece ever. I wrote it at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. It was published on the Sunday New York Times opinion page on 11 October 2008.
"BEWARE of geeks bearing formulas." So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives "weapons of financial mass destruction" an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.... more at NYTimes, or more at dooling.com.
A Fraud by Any Other Name
Ten major Wall Street investment firms agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle conflict-of-interest charges; they would do things like issue enthusiastic research reports about the same stocks they were describing as worthless junk in internal e-mail messages.
By Richard Dooling, New York Times, 4 May 2003
''If you don't know jewelry, know your jeweler,'' says Warren Buffett, the most successful investor in America and the man whose company owns Borsheim's, a jewelry store here. Only Tiffany in New York City is bigger, but Mr. Buffett bought Borsheim's 14 years ago from its owner, Ike Friedman, without even an audit. Mr. Buffett said he was confident he was getting value received when he dealt with Mr. Friedman: ''And that's just what I got -- precisely as I had when I purchased a single piece of jewelry from him.''.... more at NYTimes
Revenge of the Cornhuskers
The New York Times Op-Ed page asked writers in different parts of the country to provide snapshots of their local economies over the next year. This was my first dispatch.
By Richard Dooling, New York Times, 2 October 2005
Just as most of the water in Nebraska runs underground in the nation's largest aquifer (the Ogallala Aquifer), most of the money in town is hidden in the accounts of investors, who follow the example of the town's alpha money man, Warren Buffett, and don't flaunt it. Mr. Buffett, who weighs in at $44 billion according to the latest list from Forbes, lives in a modest house in midtown. I don't know where the other two billionaires in town live -- Joe Ricketts of Ameritrade and Walter Scott Jr. of the construction company Peter Kiewit Sons' -- probably in very nice houses that mere dot-com millionaires would deem totally inadequate.
Omaha also has hundreds of "original investors." They or their parents "gave a young fella named Warren Buffett a few thousand dollars back in the 70's." Now the few thousand dollars are worth 40 kajillion, and the "original investors" live down the street, in fiscal anonymity. If they feel the need to throw money around, they do it out of town, and wash their hands afterwards....more at NYTimes
The Wizard Drops the Curtain
Almost twenty years ago, Berkshire shareholders were already anxious about succession matters.
By Richard Dooling, New York Times, 9 May 2007
THE Berkshire Hathaway Corporation held its annual shareholders meeting here last weekend, drawing a record 27,000 capitalist faithful from all over the world to worship at the Qwest Center in downtown Omaha. Onstage, the chairman and investor in chief Warren Buffett and his partner and vice chairman, Charles Munger, once again entertained the well-washed and well-heeled masses and educated them in the doctrine of value investing.... more at NYTimes.com, or more at dooling.com
Send the Dead, A Novella and Four Stories (2025)
by Richard Dooling
Send The Dead will be my first published novella. It might even qualify as a historical novella, because it takes place on a film set, and the film being made tells the story of the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733.
If you cannot abide horror, please wait until January for my sixth novel, The Acolyte, about an altar boy who must help a federal prosecutor and the FBI bust a Catholic priest's child exploitation ring. Still dark to be sure, but probably not "literary horror," a category I sometimes end up in. More in the vein of Brain Storm, for those familiar with my third novel.
Jacket Blurb
Young Marina January offers guided tours of plantation ruins and historical landmarks all over the island of St. John. In the taverns, coffee houses, and national parks, she gives storytelling lectures on the history of the Virgin Islands, teaching tourists about the St. John Slave Uprising of 1733.
One evening, she’s approached by an acclaimed director who is making a new historical film, and the production company is setting up shop on the shores of St. John. He wishes to recruit Marina as a location consultant, a promising turn of events, just in time to pay this month’s rent.
Her first day on set, the film’s handsome star, Gabriel Nash, takes a liking to Marina and offers yet another opportunity as his personal assistant. Willing to work dual roles, Marina agrees, until she discovers that Nash is a narcissist with dangerous dark secrets. His obsessions nearly kill her. He misjudges her appetite for revenge and her expertise in the lore of the occult.
With his novella Send the Dead, New York Times bestselling author Richard Dooling concocts a potent brew of literary horror mixed with history, Hollywood, tropical sun, and supernatural terror.
Along for the ride are four other short works that appeared in The New Yorker, Story, Smoke, and Esquire magazines, speculative stories about aging and immortality, religion, culture shock, science, magic, all-too-human madness, and the tyranny of the normal.
- Publication date: 19 October 2025
- Formats: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle Ebook, and Kindle Unlimited
Reading
God protects those he loves from worthless reading.
—Johan Kaspar Lavater
I Have Read
The Immortal Irishman, Biography (2017)
The Irish Revolutionary Who Became An American Hero.
By Timothy Egan
How did I miss this fabulous biography by former New York Times columnist, Timothy Egan, published in 2017?
Thomas Francis Meagher (1823–1867) was an Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848. After being convicted of sedition by the Brits, Meagher (which Americans pronounce as Marr, and the Irish pronounce more like Maher) was exiled to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in Australia.
In 1852, Meagher escaped and made his way to the United States, where he settled in New York City. He studied law and worked as a journalist, until he joined the U.S. Army at the outset of the American Civil War, rose to the rank of brigadier general, recruited Irish immigrants to join the Irish Brigade, and led them into battle on behalf of the Union. He earned high praise from President Lincoln. Following the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson appointed Meagher to be Secretary of the new Territory of Montana. Soon after arriving there, he was designated Acting Governor.
I first heard the incredible story of Thomas Meagher from Barry Moloney, a renowned tour guide in Kinsale, County Cork. Back home in Montana, neighbors also recommended The Immortal Irishman.
As the author put it, "In less than a year, the convict Tom Meagher had gone from muttering dirty jokes around a smoky fire in a Tasmanian shepherd’s hut to gold-rimmed tea service with the most powerful man in America."
The first two chapters serve as a grim reminder of how the English have terrorized the Irish since at least the time of Cromwell and on through Meagher's lifetime and beyond. The rest is superb biography, with a side dish of history, set in Ireland, Tasmania, New York, and Montana.
In July, 1867, Meagher died under suspicious circumstances, an accidental drowning in the Missouri River near Fort Benton at a time when Montana was home to ruthless vigilante groups, some of whom had it in for the new governor. At the time of his death, Meagher had been looking into the death of another prominent citizen of early Montana, John Bozeman, who was murdered three months before, in April 1867. Bozeman and his partner, Tom Cover, were supposedly attacked by Blackfeet warriors while traveling along the Yellowstone River, but some historians suspect that Bozeman was killed by Cover himself, or perhaps by a henchman of the wealthy Montana rancher, Nelson Story (see Lonesome Dove history below), or by a jealous husband, because Bozeman had a dangerous habit of flirting with married women.
The Immortal Irishman, at Amazon
Letter Slot (2025), a Story
By Owen King
Owen King is the author of The Curator and co-author of Sleeping Beauties.
Letter Slot is an Amazon Original Story from a collection called The Shivers. I'll avoid spoiling the end by stealing text from the Amazon site:
A struggling teenager pours out his worries in a letter and drops it through the mail slot of an old abandoned house. He's surprised when a response arrives, promising good fortune for the price of just one name: someone he hates.
Just as the reader starts to wonder, how is he gonna end this? Twist and snap, that's how. He manages to be both tender and ruthless.
Letter Slot on Amazon. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, it's a featured title.
Western Novels
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
—Robertson Davies
In that spirit, I recently went on a binge rereading Western novels. Three of my favorites:
- Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger (1964)
- True Grit, by Charles Portis (1968)
- Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry (1985)
Little Big Man
Western novels have been around since the dime novels glorifying the likes of Kit Carson. Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour arguably rescued the Western from the pulp stacks, but Thomas Berger probably did it better than anyone else with the 1964 publication of Little Big Man. I am old enough that I saw the 1970 film when it came out, same title, starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway. Later in life, the novel was a surprise and a delight.
Little Big Man is the oral memoir of Jack Crabb, 121 years old, whose tale reveals that he was, by turns, an adopted Cheyenne warrior, frontiersman, scout, gunslinger, buffalo hunter, and, by his own account, lone white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And Thomas Berger did his homework. He read George Grinnell's The Fighting Cheyenne and spent years reading articles about the West in the university presses, especially, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Fun fact, he didn't visit the Little Big Horn battlefield until two years after the book was published. American Heritage, An Interview with the Author of "Little Big Man".
Cormac McCarthy, Ron Hansen, and many others came after. See Ron Hansen Rides Again, by Joseph Bottum for a nice survey.
True Grit
I've seen both movie adaptations of True Grit, by Charles Portis, and much prefer the Coen Brothers' version with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Hailee Steinfeld. The novel tops them all, of course, and I am often reminded of John LeCarre's quip, "Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes."
Charles Portis is having yet another moment as a comic genius. Conan O'Brien among other comedians lent a blurb to a new edition of Portis's Masters of Atlantis (1985), a hysterical send-up of cults.
Lonesome Dove
This long and satisfying novel tells the story of two retired Texas Rangers, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, who drive a herd of longhorns from Texas to Montana.
I had read it long ago, I but wanted to listen to it on audio during a drive across North Dakota. Alas, the Audible version, performed by Lee Horsely, was tough going. I had forgotten, if I ever noticed, that in the novel, Gus McCrae (the character played by Robert Duvall in the miniseries) is described as having a loud annoying voice, and the narrator, Mr. Horsely, felt obliged to remind me of that every time Gus spoke. I stopped listening and reread the book instead.
Soon after moving to Montana, I learned that Lonesome Dove has roots in history. In 1866, a Texas cattleman named Nelson Story bought over a thousand head of Longhorn cattle and drove them from Texas to Montana on the Bozeman Trail, where he sold the cattle for ten times the price to hungry gold miners in Virginia City and Bozeman. Story became a leading citizen of Bozeman, where he gave Paradise Valley its name and built his own ranch there.
In "The Making of Lonesome Dove," Larry McMurtry describes how Lonesome Dove the novel came to be:
I have the greatest difficulty thinking about my books once I have finished them and a like difficulty reading anything about them, whether good, bad, dumb, smart, friendly, hostile. I thought Professor West’s piece was smart and good-natured, but what else to say?
First, that Lonesome Dove was an unproduced screenplay for 12 years, done for John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda. Had the film been produced, I'd not have written the book.
Second, that I almost did not finish the book. I stopped and wrote two other books (Cadillac Jack, Desert Rose) and resumed Lonesome Dove only when I saw an old church bus by a Texas road that said LONESOME DOVE BAPTIST CHURCH. Acquiring a good title provoked me to finish the tale.
Third, that a cattleman named Nelson Story drove a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana in 1866 and sold them at a profit. I thought of the drive in Lonesome Dove as occurring in the late 186Os or early 187Os. I made a note to myself in the first draft to put in the Union Pacific Railroad—I wanted them to cross it in a big sandstorm—but then I forgot my own note. A long novel often involves such sloppiness.
Last, that I think of the West as the phantom limb of the American psyche, not there but not forgotten.
McMurtry was consistently skeptical about the acclaim showered on Lonesome Dove. He maintained to the end that he had never watched the miniseries and didn't think Lonesome Dove was anywhere near his best book. "I think of Lonesome Dove as the Gone With the Wind of the West," he says. "It's a pretty good book; it's not a towering masterpiece."
I Am Reading
I don't care what Gary Krist writes about. He's like John McPhee in that he just gets out of the way and makes anything he writes about into a great story, which also happens to be true story. Some of my friends and neighbors in Montana know him for The White Cascade (2008), which tells the tale of the Great Northern Railway disaster and America's deadliest avalanche, and avalanche stories resonate up here in the Rockies. He's also known for city-based narrative histories of Chicago (City of Scoundrels), New Orleans (Empire of Sin), or, my favorite so far, Los Angeles (The Mirage Factory (2018), Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles. The latest one tells the story of San Francisco by way of true crime and careful history. So far, Trespassers could beat the LA book.
Trespassers at the Golden Gate
A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco
By Gary Krist
It opens with a murder in broad daylight aboard the Oakland ferry in 1870. Laura Fair, a wronged mistress, followed her married lover, Alexander Crittenden, a prominent attorney and California politician, aboard the ferry, where the cad met up with his wife. Crittenden had lied to Laura Fair for years about leaving his wife and family to be with her, until she finally entered a kind of fugue state aboard the ferry, pulled a pistol from under her veil, and shot her lover in the chest, while his wife looked on. Crittenden died the next day, and the ensuing trial was page one news all over the country.
"I did it and I don’t deny it," said Laura Fair of the murder. Call it a why-done-it, and Krist tells the stories of the players and the history of San Francisco since the Gold Rush.
Reviewed at the Wall Street Journal: A Death in the Bay.
Trespassers at the Golden Gate at Amazon
Upcoming
The next issue of I Would Prefer Not To will include more information about Send The Dead.
Please Forward This Email
I hope to attract subscribers without using more intrusive newsletter platforms, so please forward this email to other passionate readers and writers.