Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

From longtime New Yorker writer and author of In the Early Times, Tad Friend's "side-splittingly funny" Cheerful Money is both a gorgeously written family memoir and a sharp cultural study of the decline of the American WASP (Mary Karr).

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of College, 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 t...