In his review of The Triple Package by Amy Chua, Richard Kim gives us a witty and engaging look at yet another shocker from the famous (notorious?) husband and wife team of Chua and Rubenfeld.  She and husband Jed Rubenfeld are back again with another book about  success in today’s socioeconomically Darwinian America.

by Richard Kim for The Nation.

 The Triple Package by Amy Chua

Now that she’s captured our minds – if not our hearts – with her advocacy of Pavlovian child rearing, our Yalie prof has given us a paen to ethnic exceptionalism in yet another surgically precise examination of what it takes to become King or Queen of the Hill in post-industrial America. Her (and hubby’s) conclusion: it’s very much a racial/ethnic thing. If you’re a member of one or more of the eight ethnic groups mentioned below, you’re in luck because you possess all three core group characteristics that give you a head start in the race to the top. The Big 3 qualities are…feel special, be insecure and believe in death before quitting (more or less)!

“She’s ba-a-ack! Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, who last tormented status-anxious Americans with tales of her emotionally sadistic parenting techniques in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has produced a sequel of sorts. The Triple Package, which she wrote with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld (also a professor of law at Yale), attempts to explain how “three unlikely traits” account for the “rise and fall of cultural groups in America.” As the power couple describe it, in both the book and their widely shared New York Times op-ed “What Drives Success?”, these three traits are: a collective superiority complex (“a deeply internalized belief in your group’s specialness”); a simultaneous and abiding sense of insecurity (“a goading chip on the shoulder, a need to prove oneself”); and impulse control (not so much against carnal desires, but the ability to resist “the temptation to give up in the face of hardship”). According to Chua and Rubenfeld, only eight groups in the United States today possess this Triple Package—and none of them are gay male porn stars. They are: Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mormons, Lebanese, Iranians, Cubans and Nigerians.”

Read on at http://www.thenation.com/article/178149/return-tiger-mother