The 'Tiger Mother': Mommie severest

By now, surely, you're familiar with Amy Chua, the Yale law professor and self-described "Tiger Mother" whose ferocious parenting style has provoked a raging tempest of reaction among pundits and parents alike, scoring her book a Time magazine cover.

Chua is a publicist's dream, but unless you hold the book in your hands you may be missing her point, summed up on the jacket: "This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it's about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeing taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a 13-year-old." "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" is a mothering memoir, not a parenting tract, and it doesn't have a happy ending.

Yes, the stories you've heard are all here: how Chua rejects her daughters' halfhearted birthday cards, how she threatens to burn their stuffed animals if they don't practice harder, how she banishes everything from their lives beyond homework and music, how she threatens and badgers and yells. These are not lurid highlights; Chua makes you wince on nearly every page. It is, admittedly, refreshing to hear from a parent who never dithers about what's best for her darlings, but Chua's confidence verges uncomfortably on the abusive, and occasional threads of mitigating irony are too tenuous to convince us that she is truly self-aware. What kind of mother writes admiringly of her eighth-grade daughter, "Even more than me, she can take anything: exclusion, excoriation, humiliation, loneliness"? What kind of mother insists on respect from her children, but sits next to them on the piano bench saying, "Oh my God, you're just getting worse and worse"?

Chua gets the results she wants for her daughters: the stellar grades, the Carnegie Hall debut, the stunned admiration of parents and peers. Sophia withstands the bullying without biting back. But the younger one, Lulu, proves a tiger in her own right; at 13, she stands up in a cafe and rebels at the top of her lungs. "You're a terrible mother," she screams. "Everything you say you do for me is actually for yourself." Chua protests that she finds nagging her children just as miserably unpleasant as they do. But she does admit that "in Chinese thinking, the child is the extension of the self." When Sophia and Lulu shine, Chua basks shamelessly in the glow. Lulu has a point.

Carnegie Hall is all very well, Chua's critics complain, but what about empathy, compassion, trust? How can a child learn these if her mother doesn't model them? Chua might argue that nice guys have kids who finish last - her own strict upbringing propelled her to two Harvard degrees and tenure at Yale. But "Tiger Mother" proves her critics right. Chua is not happy to have been humbled by her 13-year-old. To the end, she seems disturbingly unwilling to feel what her children are feeling; to empathize with them. If you're wondering what kind of adults tiger-mothered children grow into, you need look no further than Chua herself.

BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER, by Amy Chua. Penguin Press, 237 pp., $25.95.