Cheerful Money

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 ancesto