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Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor |  | Author: Tad Friend
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
Buy New: $8.24
as of 9/9/2010 04:36 CDT details
You Save: $6.75 (45%)
New (31) Used (17) from $5.93
Seller: VOORHEES_BOOKS
Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 64575
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0316003182
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780316003186
ASIN: 0316003182
Publication Date: July 1, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780316003186 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Also Available In:
| • | Hardcover - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor | | • | Audio Cassette - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Library Edition) | | • | Audio CD - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Library Edition) | | • | Audible Audio Edition - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor | | • | Preloaded Digital Audio Player - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor [With Earbuds] | | • | Unknown Binding - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) | | • | Kindle Edition - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor | | • | MP3 CD - Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of SwarthmoreCollege, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden--to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Tad noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's age-old traditions and expectations. Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp, Cheerful Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
 Hilariously wistful October 1, 2009
Chris Hudson (Seattle, WA)
50 out of 60 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book. In an effort to understand his own rather constrained, Waspy nature, Tad Friend researches the lives of his various relatives--for the most part cheerful enough affairs on the surface (most of the time), but seething with a kind of quiet heartbreak. Friend himself would seem the picture of contentment: a successful NEW YORKER writer, a droll attractive fellow with loads of droll attractive friends, he yet feels a numbness of the soul that he can't quite understand. Coming to terms with this--the Wasp emotional inheritance--is the burden of this book. Nicely structured with a lot of contrapuntal set pieces about this or that relative, this or that girlfriend, the story draws one irresistibly along--and one might as well say it: I laughed and I cried, pretty much in equal parts. What I liked best about the book was the (how to put it?) companionability of the author--like a charming (but hitherto somewhat aloof) old pal who has a few too many one night and decides to bare his soul, half-seriously, though his audience comes to take him very seriously indeed.
Beautifullly written, painfully accurate. December 27, 2009
Wilkie (New York)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Mr. Friend's writing is beautiful and precise, always, and even more so when he writes about his own family. I find the subject matter of Cheerful Money painfully true, and so appreciate Mr. Friend's honesty and clarity. I also sense echoes of Walter Stegner's amazing novel Crossing To Safety, as well as to George Howe Colt's enlightening memoir The Big House.
Mr. Friend's memoir is not just a chronicle of the decline of WASPdom and its influence in 20th American culture, but also a virtuoso portrait of various aspects of human nature. He quotes his Uncle Paddy as claiming that his lovely and haunting portrait of his mother in the New Yorker was not 'gray' enough, too black and white; but almost every 'character' in this memoir is subtly drawn up so that we neither feel too much dislike or like for any of them. Everyone has their own foibles, even if they are WASP's.
Like a delicious dessert June 16, 2010
Mel Welsch (St. Louis)
I kept reading just a page more and then I would put it aside for the long trip I am taking next month. And, then, I read a few more, another chapter...soon I had devoured it all. I am in mourning. Too wonderful to describe.
Should be titled: A Field Guide for Living in New England August 22, 2010
LettersHead (New England)
This kind of memoir is not for everyone, but I admire that Mr. Friend does not shy away from recounting his own ridiculous behavior in concert with that of his relatives, most whom I can never keep straight because the names all sound alike and they keep blending families. I wish I had read this when I moved to New England in 1982, but alas at that time Mr. Friend was one of those Harvard men that I could not stand and so was in no shape to fill me in. It's a great read, especially for the transplants who marry the East Coast WASP because they these days are usually too repressed to get up the gumption to marry eachother - hence the waning splendor.
Cheerful Money is good value November 13, 2009
Caliope (Eugene, OR)
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
If you are interested in the many types of Americans that are at home in our country you should read Mr. Friend's recollection of his family. It gives a clear and vivid picture of the monied, established families that used to be "in charge" of the power areas in this society. Because Mr. Friend thinks the time of the WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) is rapidly disappearing, he enjoys recalling what it meant to grow up in this privileged group. The book is not filled with regrets or judgments; it just recalls the experiences that made Mr. Friend an enjoyable writer for today's media. The photographs are a happy addition to the text, as is the family tree which you will refer to to keep track of the generations.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
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