Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor,   ISBN:9780316003179

Customer Rating: 

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.

Customer Rating: 

I quickly found myself skimming for "The Good Parts" from among these extensive family histories and memoirs of old line monied people and their ancestors. Of course, each reader will have their own idiosyncratic "Good parts", and mine were the social class boundaries, and the religious/political opinions of the wealthy from the 1900's on. As well as the author's own love life, career and subsequent marriage with children. In essence, I had to do a lot of "skipping and picking" to get what I wanted from this book.

Customer Rating: 

How many ways can a reviewer say boring? I hoped this would be an exciting look into the elegant, distinctive, old-fashioned WASP lifestyle. I wanted to read, to experience, in some secondhand way, the glitter, the sparkle, the charm of the wealthy and the socially elite. What I did get in this book was a lot of painfully boring stories, dry humor that I didn't think was funny or wasn't able to relate to, and affiliations that meant nothing to me. I wanted to love this book, but woe is me....I just didn't.

Customer Rating: 

...this book is best enjoyed by the people who were there.

Memoirs to me are an exercise in self indulgence unless the person writing has had a particularly interesting life. The author of this book hasn't.

He seems like a nice man, and is obviously a talented writer but perhaps he spends too much time with people of the same background (The New Yorker is hardly a mag for the masses) because he seems to think that nutty relatives, disappointments in childhood, the sad ends of promising people, and parents you love but don't always understand, belong exclusively to the life of a WASP. I'm very much not of his culture and yet I've experienced much of what he talks about. There's a snobbishness in thinking that his background elevates his memories to memoir status. Maybe that's the only thing about the book that is uniquely WASP. I get the sense of a man in mid-life trying to figure himself out through the lens of his childhood. Good for him. But it's not unique, and it's not interesting enough for a book.

Customer Rating: 

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.