Books by Tad Friend

"Is the father I wanted the father my children want me to be, too? Or is the father I got the father I've inevitably become? 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, writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and father and trying 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 feels distinctly old, troubled by his yawning distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror, by a grimace that's so like his father's. Theodore Friend, [a] ... historian and the former president of Swarthmore College, was gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children. Tad writes that 'trying to reach him in any deeper way 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. Then Tad finds his father's files, a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from and more complex than the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be. It turns out that Tad has been behaving self-destructively in the same way Day was--a secret each kept from everyone, even themselves. These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role, both as a father and a son. But is it too late for both of them?"--

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. In Lost in Mongolia a collection of Tad Friend''s most original, witty, and wide-ranging articles and essays from The New Yorker, Esquire, and Outside 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 White Trash Nation, In Praise of Middlebrow, 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.Lost in Mongolia is a one-of-a-kind collection from a refreshingly candid and well-traveled journalist.