Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Why do some rise from humble beginnings to great achievements, while many others don't? Finally, we get someone with credibility to expose the elephant in the room - the fact that some cultures are far more successful in fostering academic achievement than others. Granted, academic achievement is far from being the sole determinant of success, no matter how you might define that term, but it certainly is key ingredient to STEM success, as well as having the opportunity and ability to launch a Silicon Valley startup - talents we're sorely lacking vs. many of our Asian competitors. Obvious 'more successful' cultures - those of Chinese/Japanese/South Korean (Confucianism followers) origin, as well as others with significant Jewish heritage - plain as day to all of us high-school students decades ago. Authors Chua/Rubenfeld also add several other groups, including Indian-Americans. Indian-American pupils have won the Scripps National Spelling Bee 11 out of the last 15 years, including the last six years straight. More specifics: Of the 141 U.S. Presidential Scholars in 2012, 48 were Asian Americans (52 in 2011) - mostly Chinese and Indian. Asian-American SAT scores average 143 points of the U.S. average - including 63 points over whites, and that gap is increasing. While just 5% of the population, they comprise 19% of the undergraduates at Harvard, 16% at Yale, 19% at Princeton, 19% at Stanford, and many suspect there's a 'glass ceiling' that limits their admissions below what they would be based on National Merit Scholarships and SAT scores. Intel Science Talent Searches over the last five years have picked 23 Asian-Americans (mostly Indian and Chinese) of the top 50. Asians and Asian-Americans represent 30-50% of enrollees in leading U.S. music programs, while all four Americans first-prize winners at the quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition (likely the world's most prestigious) were Asian-Americans. Indian-Americans have the highest median household income of any Census-tracked ethnic group in the U.S. Taiwanese and Chinese households are close behind. Since 1965, Indian-Americans have won 3 Nobel prizes and Chinese-Americans 6. Pepsi, Sun Microsystems, MasterCard, United Airlines, Motorola, Adobe Systems, Citigroup, Citibank, HSBC North America, McKinsey, U.S. Airways, and now Microsoft have current or recent American-Indian CEOs. American-Indian immigrants such as Vinod Khosla have founded more Silicon Valley startups than the next four immigrant groups combined (Britain, Taiwan, China, Japan). Bobby Jihdal and Nikki Haley are governors, Fareed Zakaria, Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Sanjay Gupta are well-known leaders in the media and medicine. Then there's the Jewish-American population, 1.7% of the total. Four of the top-ten paid 2011 CEOs were Jewish Americans, four of the top-ten hedge-fund managers, and 20 of the top 50 on the Forbes 2009 list of wealthiest Americans. They also comprise 51% of Pulitzer-prize winners for non-fiction and 13% for fiction, 37% of Academy Award winners for best director, 13% of M.D.s, three of the nine Supreme Court judges, and 36% of U.S. Nobel-winners. World-wide, Jews comprise only 0.2% of the population, while being awarded 20% of the Nobel prizes. Stuyvesant, one of the best U.S. high schools, new students in 2013 included 9 blacks, 24 Latinos, 177 whites, 640 Asians. Bronx Science, another NC super high-school, has a student body made up of 64% Asian-Americans - yet, most Chinese immigrants are not admitted via skill or education criteria. NYC offers free tutoring for poor families - 43% of recipients, yet they only make up 14% of the total student population. The 'secret' of all these successful cultures is no secret - hard work, backed up by parental support. Indian-Americans have formed self-help groups in their communities that help their children in academics and science/computer/electronic ventures; a weekend trip to my local university library invariably shows it largely filled with Asian students, despite their comprising only a small fraction of total enrollees. And I still remember my Jewish high-school peers - all good students, and committed to learning. (Unfortunately, I was neither.) 'Triple Threat' digs into this subject deeper than most, showing that the superior results of some cultures aren't simply an artifact of eg. immigrants being rich. Another interesting finding - Nigerians comprise < 1% of the U.S. black population, yet number over a quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School. (And yes, I can almost unerringly identify Nigerian blacks - they're the ones that usually demonstrate a much better work ethic than my own. Embarrassing.) Three traits, when combined, propel these more successful cultures, per Chua/Rubenfeld: 1)A superiority complex, 2)Insecurity - a sense that they haven't done good enough, and 3)Impulse control - the ability to defer immediate gratification to instead build a better personal future. I'm skeptical of the 'superiority aspect' they cite - I can't ever recall anyone from those groups acting superior, except possibly out of frustration that others don't exert comparable efforts and then complain they're 'picked on' or 'discriminated against.' The inadequacy aspect - that's been repeatedly demonstrated by others such as the late Professor Stevenson at the University of Michigan who compared parental attitudes, pupil effort, and pupil achievement between the U.S., Taiwan, China, and Japan. (American parents were satisfied with their pupils' progress and our students relatively dumb but happy - completely the opposite in Asia. Impulse control has been linked to higher lifetime achievement previously. Bottom-Line: 'Triple Threat' is provocative and brings at least a temporary roll-back of PC blindness. It is not the first to do so. Hopefully, us 'happy Americans' will not toss it off as offensive and racist. Fat chance - too many knee-jerk 'thought leaders' will see it as 'radioactive' and try to boost their ratings by dissing it.