<p>Perhaps this Yale Daily News piece has been linked in the other threads about the Chua book - I'll link it here instead of finding out, since the other threads are each now 49 pages long. In it, Chua seems to be backing off somewhat from her uber-controlling mother-as-puppetmaster advocacy:</p>
<p>Q&A:</a> Yale Law professor Amy Chua | Yale Daily News</p>
<p>yeah - good thing to. She is sure to make a lot of money selling this book, but she wouldn’t want to lose her job at Yale. Wouldn’t do well for Yale law School to be employing a confessed child-abuser. She could have avoided a lot of hassles, if not sales, by publishing the book as fiction.</p>
<p>Good lord, this woman is delusional:</p>
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<p>I’ve read the book. I read for a living, lol. There is NOTHING in this book that conveys this statement she’s making. None whatsoever. At the end, she makes a painful concession to back off her daughter about violin because she realized she had lost the power struggle.</p>
<p>She wants to sell books. The presale publicity did not portray her in a very good light (and friends who have read the book agree with this assessment). If she doesn’t lighten up, there will be tons of copies of this on the shelves…and no speaking engagements (which net money too).</p>
<p>I think she is going to sell tons of books and be in great demand as a speaker in some quarters. I am not sure her daughters lives will ever be the same. “Oh, you are the one with the crazy mother - you poor thing … did you get into Harvard?”</p>
<p>The book is sold out everywhere. Amy Chua does not have to worry about selling books.</p>
<p>I’m not buying it for a minute. She is being slaughtered in the media and continues to back-pedal on her story. I agree it’s not about selling books at this point. They are selling. Not because it’s a great book, but like a train-wreck you can’t help but look. She is desperately trying to do damage control on her public image. As a professor in elite academia, she doesn’t want to be drug through the mud. Controversial is fine, welcomed even. This is something she didn’t count on and I’m sure isn’t helping her career in the long run.</p>
<p>She can back pedal all she wants, but she can not change what she actually wrote. What I read in the WSJ and elsewhere is very very close to the actual book, and what she says now to re-spin it does not capture the book. It is not as if you read the book and come away with a different, and more positive impression of her (other than her humor/likability which shines through…but it does not paint her as a better mother IMHO).</p>
<p>Just checked store inventory near my Michigan suburb. Plenty at all Borders and Barnes and Nobles!</p>
<p>I’ll just wait and either borrow it from my school lending library OR get it when it hits the used bookstore later this spring…If I bother to read it at all.</p>
<p>She does seem delusional, and it’s an embarrassment to Yale-- the behaviors she engaged in were bordering on criminal and the fact that she can write and publish a book that essentially defends them (I’d love to meet her editor!) is pretty damning. And what about the husband who allowed it?</p>
<p>I heard a brief clip from a recent interview that she gave and she said that her book wasn’t intended to offer advice on child rearing and that it wasn’t meant to suggest that the Tiger Mom method was superior to other methods of child rearing. I think those comments are disingenuous; IMO she’s responding to the negative outcry and trying to repair her image.</p>
<p>I agree with starbright, above. She does NOT convey “all you have to do is listen to your kids and the happiness of your child must come first.” 95% of the book is about her extreme parenting, and at the very end she backs down a little bit, but it is not accompanied by much soul-searching or regret or remorse or embarrassment over the things she did, much less any suggestion that if she had to do it over again, she’d do things differently. </p>
<p>I do agree that the book is more nuanced than the WSJ article, but she simply doesn’t come across as someone who has had much of an epiphany other than “well, this didn’t work for Lulu.”</p>
<p>I am still a little puzzled that when she wrote the book she didn’t see this huge contraversy coming. This is a law professor who grew up in this country and must have had more than a fair share of contact with other parents and educators. How was she so clueless that her book wouldn’t be too hot with either Chinese or non-Chinese people. Was she just that “nerdy” or did she just try to be sensational so her book could sell only to find herself in a bigger trouble than she’d expected?</p>
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<p>Huh? This has nothing to do with her professional work as a law professor at Yale. </p>
<p>If she was an employee of the CIGNA corporation it would be an embarrassment to CIGNA?</p>
<p>For those who missed this, here’s an editorial in today’s NYTimes calling Amy Chua a Wimp. David Brooks explains that he thinks she skipped the hard part of parenting: raising girls as they battle clicks, and sleepovers. Insisting they spend hours and hours practicing their math facts is easy in comparison.
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<p>If she were a professor at State U. her book would never have been published - child protective services would have been notified. But now we’re all reading/talking about the train wreck.</p>
<p>There are quotes from her book that bear an unfortunate similarity to the recorded telephone tirade Alec Baldwin launched at his then 12 year old daughter (which called his parental fitness into question in the court system). Baldwin called his daughter a selfish little pig for slighting him; Chua called her daughter boring and ordinary for not wanting to taste the caviar (and I suspect that in Chua’s world being boring and ordinary is worse than being a selfish little pig, provided you are the #1 selfish little pig). I don’t see publishers lined up asking Baldwin to write a book on parenting skills; largely because his parenting was put on national television and common sense weighed in - too bad this publisher didn’t use any in screening Chua’s book.</p>
<p>It says something about us as a society that this volume was published because of the mother’s professional standing, completely unconnected from expertise in human behavior or child psychology, even though the content would be reprehensible coming from anyone of lower social status. What were her publishers thinking?</p>
<p>Perhaps her editor will delight the American public with a future volume about protecting your loved ones reputation through honor killing - if a practitioner can be found with Ivy credentials…</p>
<p>I don’t think it says anything about us as a society. Ayelet Waldman writes similar books (from a different perspective) and she has no special expertise in human behavior or child psychology either. I don’t have a problem that she wrote the book.</p>
<p>Bchan, I think you are overstating the role of credentials. Most of my closest friends teach at such places, and I used to. Everyone writes books, no one reads them. Recall her last two? I think the big thing is the controversial culture angle here…and most of all, connections to the right agent to pull in ‘high 6 figures’ as an advance. That is the driver here. In fact, I can think of two colleagues who have written parenting books who are full professors at similar type schools. You’ve never heard of these books. </p>
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<p>For close to a million bucks just on the advance (who knows the final take)? For publicity for her daughter applying to colleges? For being pushed by a publisher who just new the inflammatory and controversial nature would sell this book like hotcakes? These and other things combined with the fact that she doesn’t know how to write well enough to get her ‘real’ point across in 2 months of writing. And utter cluelessness about how the world would interpret what she wrote without the advantage that she has (her own self-serving biases along with 18 years of history that is not provided in the book).</p>
<p>It was obviously a very good business decision on the part of the publisher to publish the book. It looks like a lot of copies are being sold. There are obviously a lot of strong opinions on all sides of this issue, which makes this a topic of general public interest. </p>
<p>I don’t think it is particularly relevant that the author is on the faculty at a prominent law school. It certainly doesn’t reflect on that law school, which obviously doesn’t teach parenting skills. </p>
<p>Whether or not the actions described in the book meet the legal criteria for child abuse, I have no idea. But I doubt legal action against this couple of lawyers would be wise- or successful.</p>
<p>BTW, I have no problem with the large sums of money being paid to the author. Well, maybe a little bit. About as much problem I have with the money a certain politician has made who has recently written some books of questionable literary merit.</p>