Maven Takes On Business Books

A quick housekeeping note: Authors, readers and even those famously lazy flacks in book publishing, feel free to drop me notes, letting me know of upcoming books. I'll be focusing like a laser at whether the words contained within are a Help or Hindrance to investors. If you disagree with my ruling, send me a reasoned rebuttal. I'll give voice to some of the good ones.

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A Weekend with Warren Buffett: And Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures by Randy Cepuch (Thunder's Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon) gets a Help seal slapped on its front cover.

Cepuch, a corporate copywriter, set out across America to attend annual meetings. Think of him as the William Least Heat-Moon of the shareholder set. (Blue Highways was certainly more quirky than A Weekend With Warren Buffett, but the former never made me one thin dime.)

While basic in many respects, Cepuch's book can serve investors in one of two ways. For beginners, it explains what annual meetings are, how they vary and what insights you can glean from them if you look around the edges. For the more experienced, the book can serve as a reminder that -- despite all the formalities and ways the PR folks have worn these meetings smooth of natural interplay between management and the public -- there is still a lot to see, hear and sense.