Link to January 14 San Jose Mercury News article, "Well, are Chinese mothers superior? New book creates big catfight".
Excerpt: In China, the tiger -- not the lion -- is the king of beasts. So perhaps it was inevitable that when Yale law professor Amy Chua published her new memoir this week, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," describing what she apparently views as the martial art of Chinese motherhood, the claws came out.
An excerpt from the book, which recently ran under the headline "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" in the Wall Street Journal, drew more than 5,000 online comments -- most of them angry -- and Chua almost immediately began receiving death threats.
The loudest roar came not from "Western mothers," whom Chua characterized as self-esteem saps and disciplinary pushovers, but from the Asian-American matriarchy. Their outrage spilled onto Facebook and across mommy blogs nationwide.
The book excerpt was being argued about all week at Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos, where Minnie Ho's two boys -- 8 and 11 -- are students. Ho, 43, is a principal engineer at Intel and an accomplished classical pianist, both the result of being pushed by a tireless "Tiger Mom" when she was growing up.
Now, Ho and her husband are trying to prod their sons toward the same academic rigors that she endured as a girl. But she can't quite bring herself to buy Chua's maxim that "the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child."
LINKcat collection development alert: 60 holds on 2 copies.
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #5 in Books.
88 customer reviews: 35 give it 5 stars; 34 give it 1 star. (Controversy: A publisher's dream.)
Link to Wall Street Journal article....and comments.
Amy Chua's Yale Law School webpage.
Latest-breaking news:
Yale Law Prof Amy Chua Backs Away from Controversial Claims About Superiority of Chinese Mothers. (Above the Law, 1/15/2011.) Opening sentence: If you’re going to be a diva, then own it.
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