{"title":"Tad Friend","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"cheerful-money-book-tad-friend-9780316003179","title":"Cheerful Money","description":"Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at a Smith college poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden, his mother came in second--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, Friend 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49514611376401,"sku":"GOR003806814","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50135010050321,"sku":"CIN0316003174VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50238428610833,"sku":"CIN0316003174A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50348815646993,"sku":"CIN0316003174G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0316003174.jpg?v=1751357244"},{"product_id":"in-the-early-times-book-tad-friend-9780593137352","title":"In the Early Times","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn this\"dazzling\" (John Irving)memoir, acclaimed \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e staff writer Tad Friend reflects on the pressures of middle age, exploring his relationship with his dying father as he raises two children of his own.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"How often does a memoir build to a stomach-churning, I-can't-breathe climax in its final pages? . . . Brilliant, intensely moving.\"-William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of \u003ci\u003eBarbarian Days\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR- \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. But life doesn't stop to wait. In his fifties, \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and a father as he tries to grasp who he is as a son. Torn between two families, he careens between two stages in life. On some days he feels vigorous, on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash. On others, he feelsdistinctly weary, troubled by his distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror, by a grimace that's so like his father's.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e His father, an erudite historian and the former president of Swarthmore College,has long been gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children. Tad writes that \"trying to reach him always felt like ice fishing.\" Yet now Tad's father, known to his family as Day, seems concerned chiefly with the flavor of ice cream in his bowl and, when pushed, interested only in reconsidering his view of Franklin Roosevelt.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Then Tad finds his father's journal, a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be. It turns out that Tad has been self-destructing in the same way Day has-a secret eachhas kept from everyone, even themselves. These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role, as a father, as a husband, and as a son. But is it too late for both of them?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Witty, searching, and profound, \u003ci\u003eIn the Early Times\u003c\/i\u003e is an enduring meditation on the shifting tides of memory and the unsteady pillars on which every family rests.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49572286693649,"sku":"GOR012895998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740649300241,"sku":"NGR9780593137352","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50156307939601,"sku":"CIN0593137353G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50715315011857,"sku":"CIN0593137353VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0593137353.jpg?v=1751455192"},{"product_id":"cheerful-money-book-tad-friend-9780316003186","title":"Cheerful Money","description":"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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50171458846993,"sku":"CIN0316003182VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347785683217,"sku":"CIN0316003182G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000953176337,"sku":"NIN9780316003186","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52325401133329,"sku":"GOR002291270","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":53119548457233,"sku":"CIN0316003182A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0316003182.jpg?v=1750738698"},{"product_id":"lost-in-mongolia-book-tad-friend-9780812991550","title":"Lost in Mongolia","description":"Find yourself in the midst of a heated battle over a sitcom laugh track. Learn to get away with spectacular crimes. Get lost with the reindeer people in the mountains of Mongolia. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003cb\u003eLost in Mongolia\u003c\/b\u003e a collection of Tad Friend's most original, witty, and wide-ranging articles and essays from \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker, Esquire, \u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eOutside\u003c\/i\u003e we are taken on a cultural tour of global proportions. Friend reports from the entertainment mecca of Hollywood on topics that range from the life and death of River Phoenix to the widespread plagiarism of movie ideas, to why celebrity profiles are always dreadful. He critiques the larger American culture with articles such as \u003ci\u003eWhite Trash Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003e In Praise of Middlebrow, \u003c\/i\u003e and a brief rumination on what it means when your girlfriend steals and wears your favorite shirt. Readers will also journey to foreign lands and American outposts, as Friend goes on the trail of the Marcos dynasty in the Philippines, is harassed in Morocco, and digs up buried treasure in Sun Valley. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eLost in Mongolia\u003c\/b\u003e is a one-of-a-kind collection from a refreshingly candid and well-traveled journalist.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50366352064785,"sku":"CIN0812991559A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50366355702033,"sku":"CIN0812991559G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007961334033,"sku":"NIN9780812991550","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51416425791761,"sku":"CIN0812991559VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52126373544209,"sku":"NLS9780812991550","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812991559.jpg?v=1750979435"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-tad-friend.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}