Today I'm linking up with Carole from Carole's Random Life of Books for Books from the Backlog. I really enjoy the chance to feature a book that's been hiding in the piles of books for far too long!
Goodreads: Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by Tad Friend
Blurb: Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore 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 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.
Why It Needs to Come Off the Shelf: I picked this one up over a decade ago and I've kind of lost interest in it -and have been burned by similar memoirs. I need to pick this one up and see if it's a DNF or not.
I've never seen this book. I wonder if it's worth reading.
ReplyDeleteI never heard of this one. Sounds good.
ReplyDelete