cheerful money: me, my family, and the last days of wasp splendor

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.