Showing results by author "Amy Chua" in All Categories

It may be taboo to say, but some groups in America do better than others. Mormons have recently risen to astonishing business success. Cubans in Miami climbed from poverty to prosperity in a generation. Nigerians earn doctorates at stunningly high rates. Indian and Chinese Americans have much higher incomes than other Americans; Jews may have the highest of all. Why do some groups rise?

"A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what Chinese parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it…."

From the author of the international best seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a bracing and original look at the tension between our democratic egalitarian political ideals and our recalcitrant biology. Human beings are tribal. We possess a fundamental desire to belong to groups, teams, clubs, a tribe - something larger than ourselves. Political Tribes explores the phenomenon of human groupishness: how identities are shaped and formed by belonging to a group.

In Berkeley, California, in 1944, Berkeley Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after a drink in the bar when a former presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms upstairs. A rich industrialist with enemies among the anarchist factions on the far left, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of groups. But strangely, Sullivan's investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy at the Claremont, ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the Bainbridge family.

Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, the "free world" vs. the "axis of evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.

Hart, streng, erbarmungslos. So wirkt es, wenn die erfolgreiche Anwältin Amy Chua von der Erziehung ihrer Töchter Sophia und Louisa erzählt - denn die chinesischstämmige Amerikanerin ordnet das Leben ihrer Kinder nach dem Leistungsprinzip. Die Mädchen dürfen nicht bei Freunden übernachten, fernsehen oder selbst gewählten Hobbys nachgehen. Bringen sie eine Eins minus mit nach Hause, werden sie gefragt, warum sie so schlecht seien.