Okay, I liked the book but my curiosity about the cover photo is not satisfied since I still don't know if Wolff himself is one of the boys pictured in the photo? Since he submitted the photo, I am thinking possibly yes.... AND, could he be the boy on the spine of the book? That frustration aside, I bought this book for a couple of reasons: mainly because I really loved THIS BOY'S LIFE and hoped to be as entertained in this book, but also because I am a book-lover and always wished I had attended a prep school, so the setting appealed to me. Call it nostalgia for something I never had. This book is essentially a long short story with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments which are always greatly appreciated. But I couldn't get past the fact that I kept wondering about Wolff's life, the SALON interview notwithstanding. I am curious as to why he is so evasive about the facts of his life beyond the last page of THIS BOY'S LIFE where he seemed to be so brutally no-holds-barred honest and forthright. Did he graduate from Hill School, or did he leave just prior to graduation? The book mentions a father a few times, even rather benignly, but states that his mother was dead at the time of the writing which I believe was not true; so, what is autobiographical and what is not? I couldn't get beyond those curiousities as I read the book.I laughed out loud at Wolff's Ayn Rand diatribe. I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in college, too, and my father almost came undone, thought I had turned into a Commie or something, and was really very upset. To me at the age of 18 they were just books. I liked them well enough, but I also loved other authors. In this book I think Wolff introduces enough variance in the books and authors he discusses that we are left to find our own favorites.Okay, I skimmed through all 12 pages of reader reviews here, hoping to find one written by someone who went to school, Hill School, with Wolff so we could get some straight answers, but I didn't see anything.... It's been a lot of years, but maybe he'll open up all the way one of these days and satisfy a lot of curious minds by telling the rest of his story. Directly. Not fictionalized.Good book. I liked THIS BOY'S LIFE better. Not to mention his brother's book DUKE OF DECEPTION which I also loved.PS: I was thrilled to hear directly from Tobias Wolff today, February 20, 2009, and he says the photo on the cover of the book was taken at his school a couple of years prior to his arrival, so he is not in the picture. I'm still mesmerized by the boys in the photo, but now I can stop speculating on which one might be the real Tobias Wolff.