Tiger mom's triple score

If you read one book this week

'Entry Island' by Peter May (Quercus) R185

A wealthy businessman has been murdered in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence and, flying out from Montreal, a somewhat dysfunctional detective, Sime Mackenzie, joins what appears to be an open-and-shut investigation (chief suspect is the businessman's wife). But a seemingly open-and-shut procedural soon develops into an intriguing, satisfying mystery as May introduces a second narrative about the Highland clearances and the Scottish diaspora.

The Issue

"Tiger mom" Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who sparked much debate with her claim that strict discipline employed by Chinese mothers resulted in high-achieving offspring, is at it again with a new book, Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America. Co-written with husband Jed Rubenfeld, the book argues that a combination of superiority complex, insecurity and the ability to resist temptation - said triple package - has allowed some groups to advance ahead of others.

As they put it: "A seemingly un-American fact about America today is that certain groups - ethnic, religious and originating from certain nationalities - are starkly outperforming others. Some of the most successful groups won't surprise you; others might. Indian-Americans earn almost twice the household income of Americans overall. Chinese kids dramatically outperform white kids at America's schools. Jewish success is both the most fraught and the most broad-based. Jews make up only about 2% of the adult US population but account for a third of the current Supreme Court and more than a third of American Nobel laureates."

Unsurprisingly, the book has attracted controversy. Writing in Time magazine, Indian-American author Suketu Mehta argued that while "the language of racism in America has changed, the plot remains the same". It's a charge that Chua dismisses: "There is nothing racial about it. Successful groups include people of all different skin colours. Wilful blindness to facts is rarely good policy."

Crash course

The Chelsea Hotel, legendary Manhattan pile that was home to artistic excess and eccentricity for most of the 20th century, is alas no more; its spirit finally snuffed out in 2007 by dreary market forces. Once residence to such cultural luminaries as Leonard Cohen, Jackson Pollock, Bob Dylan, Edmund Wilson, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac and many others, it is now, sadly, just another expensive, antiseptic boutique hotel.

But if the walls could talk. Well, they'd tell stories like those between the covers of a fascinating new history, Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel (Simon & Schuster) by Sherill Tippins.

The bottom line

". . . homework is the new family dinner." - All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior (Ecco/HarperCollins)