Amy Chua

As opposed to Chinese Tigers robotically assembling Apple products, isn’t it more wondrous to behold the specter of two Chinese-Jewish Ivy League law ­professor/successful author Hybrid Tigers who’ve fashioned Yale student research (from a 2008 project) into a dull but probably lucrative book? Such are the rewards of our American meritocracy.

– Sandra Tsing Loh, writing in the New York Times Book Review about The Triple Package (affiliate link), the new book by Professors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School.

(Additional highlights from the review, after the jump.)

On the heels of a detailed magazine profile and a lengthy Sunday Review piece, the New York Times provided yet more coverage of Chuafeld’s new book. This time it took the form of an actual book review, penned by Sandra Tsing Loh, the prominent writer, actress, and performance artist.

Loh’s opinion of The Triple Package sounds somewhat… low. She opines:

What’s curious, though, for two authors whose books, savory or not, can be real page turners (Rubenfeld’s novels feature everything from murder to erotic asphyxiation; even Chua’s scholarly work “World on Fire” opens with a hair-raisingly riveting account of her aunt’s throat being cut), is how dull the prose is. “That certain groups do much better in America than others — as measured by income, occupational status, test scores and so on — is difficult to talk about.” “Successful people tend to feel simultaneously inadequate and superior.” “It’s hard to write or talk about Appalachia even if you’re from there.”

In fairness to Professors Chua and Rubenfeld, they are probably still in the 99th percentile of American law professors as prose stylists.

The news isn’t all bad here. Even if Loh’s review wasn’t super-favorable, it did appear on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, the most coveted real estate in the publishing trade. And other reviews of the book have been more favorable (as you can see over at The Triple Package’s Amazon page).

The book officially comes out tomorrow, February 4. So the authors will soon receive the verdict that matters most: that of the American book-buying public.

Secrets of Success: ‘The Hybrid Tiger’ and ‘The Triple Package’ [New York Times]
The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America [Amazon (affiliate link)]

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