Chua has no equal, however, when it comes to shocking honesty about tactics. She has written the kind of exposé usually staged later by former prodigies themselves. In his memoir, Norbert Wiener revealed his terror when his "gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood." Chua might recognize herself in that image—she is a tiger who roars rather than purrs. That's because no child, she points out, naturally clamors for the "tenacious practice, practice, practice" that mastery demands.    Instead of sugar-coating, Chua champions the revered Chinese custom of "eating bitterness," which Nicholas Kristof highlighted in a recent column about China's 16-year-old women's world chess champion: That is the term for the intensely disciplined labor that fuels high performance, which Chua is ready to push to extremes that she acknowledges might seem almost (her phrase) "legally actionable" in the United States. Taking it upon herself to turn Sophia, her responsive eldest, into a piano virtuoso, and balkier Lulu, three years younger, into a star violinist, she relishes the details of her ruthless program. Even Sophia, duly practicing for hours, has her lapses, one of which prompts Chua to deride her as "garbage," for which her aghast New Haven friends shun her. In the case of Lulu, we read about an all-out war for control over a tiger cub as headstrong as her mother and soon versed in standard American insolence. After lots of shrieking and music-shredding in one particularly drawn-out battle over a tricky piece, Chua writes, "we worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom." There's more of this. It's appalling.   Yet Chua also knows just how to elicit sighs of envy. The obvious allure is that she gets results. Lulu, you'll be relieved to know, finally learned that piece and was thrilled with herself: "Mommy, look—it's easy!" And that "virtuous circle" of struggle crowned by achievement brought bigger rewards. At 14, in 2007, Sophia won a competition that earned her a debut at Carnegie Hall, and though Lulu ultimately rebelled by abandoning the prodigy path on the violin, she is no slouch. She's now avidly pursuing tennis on her own (leaving her mother battling the urge to surreptitiously text the coach to suggest "questions and practice strategies"). These are, in short, girls who fit the supermold that is the acme of child-rearing expectations these days in the United States, never mind China. They are stellar students with far-beyond-amateur extracurricular accomplishments—shoo-ins when it comes to that holy grail of hyper-parenting: Ivy League admission.

Almost exactly a century ago, two Harvard professors—Dr. Boris Sidis, in psychology, and Dr. Leo Wiener, in the Slavic literature department—riled America by showcasing their two prodigy sons and the methods that had produced them, both Harvard-ready math marvels. While 11-year-old William James (Billy) Sidis stunned the university's Mathematical Club with a lecture on the fourth dimension and 15-year-old Norbert Wiener plunged into graduate studies, Dr. Sidis insisted that anyone could nurture such youthful prowess. The only obstacle, he argued, was the American embrace of mediocrity. "Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn-out sickly school-bats," he scolded in his 1911 book Philistine and Genius, "you are panic-stricken by the power of sunlight, you are in agonizing, in mortal terror of critical, reflective thought, you dread and suppress the genius of the young."   Now it's Yale's turn. In a book with a title very much in the pugnacious Sidis spirit, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua, a professor at the university's law school, sets out to provoke with her account of raising two precociously talented daughters. Chua, now making the TV rounds, is well aware her methods will make her readers gasp—with horror but also with unexpected envy.   The horror is easy to explain. Here is a mother who subjected her children to an obsessive-bordering-on-abusive level of duress in pursuit of superlative performance, not just in school but in music. Among other strictures, her girls "were never allowed … not to be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama" and also never allowed not to play the piano or violin. Chua presents hers as the "Chinese mother" approach, rooted in a heritage she says will be alien to "Westerners" but familiar to Asian-Americans strictly reared to excel, as she was by her immigrant parents. In fact, her underlying tenets would not have surprised Sidis and Wiener, Russian émigrés themselves. Fierce champions of nurture over nature, these fathers of a century ago didn't need a Confucian legacy to embrace a similarly demanding agenda: Embark on the talent-building process very early, assume the child is exceedingly sturdy, expect great feats of mastery, don't indulge youthful autonomy, demand family loyalty above peer popularity and activities. It's an immigrant striver's credo.  

The subject of my hair was a recurring one in class; the girls desperately wanted my wild curls tamed into smooth tresses.

As a result, she incurred humiliation when applying to a top medical school. After waiting for hours to be interviewed, the head of admissions told her that, despite her high test scores, the university wouldn’t accept her due to her religion, and pointed her towards a less prestigious school. Although her ID card happened to have the requisite “Jew” stamped on it in bold red letters, my mom saw her hair as the ultimate betrayer.

she was wearing a black leather skirt. It was Italian, brand new, and it was mine

was a dejournaya in Moscow. Women like her sat on every floor in every hotel in the Soviet Union. They performed a range of duties—they served tea from a samovar that simmered behind their station. They ordered your phone call to America and came to wake you if it ever went through. They even washed lingerie and t-shirts, leaving the latter folded like fine envelopes, whiter than they ever deserved to be. They also handed out your room key with varying degrees of suspicion, charm, or ennui, and if you wanted to leave it for safekeeping, collected it when you left the floor. But allegedly, the real purpose of these hall monitors was to observe your comings and goings on behalf of the se

e. He claimed to have stumbled upon a wall of reel-to-reel tape recorders there. President Reagan had just given his Evil Empire speech, and the country was being run by an ex-KGB chief, Yuri Andropov. Paranoia was everywhere—in bars and on park benches where we changed dollars for rubles on the black market with people we had no reason to trust and who must have assumed we were listening to them.

And there she was, inside my room, wearing my skirt. She was curvier than I, and the waistband stretched tightly around her middle. The leather pulled across her hips sexily, as if the utterly random act of wearing a stranger’s clothes gave her an air of danger and power. She held a pair of black high heels that I had packed along with the skirt—I knew I would never wear them on my tour of Moscow and Central Asia, but they were new and expensive, and I didn’t want to leave them in the closet of my shared New York apartment. Her own satin blouse was unbuttoned; the frayed remains of trim drifted around the cups of her bra, which, at least a size too small, pinched her ribcage and crushed her breasts.

For all I knew, she emigrated, and I had passed her on a New York City sidewalk. Maybe she got sick or simply quit her job that day and was somewhere in Moscow now, her son grown. Perhaps she did vanish one night in that hazy time right before her country’s sea change. I would never find out. Masha was in my life so briefly it shouldn’t have mattered. But to this day, I have not known comfort like the sound of her footsteps padding in and out of my hotel room as I sweltered with fever. I was twenty-three, in a strange land, nursed by the hands of a woman who, but for the clothes, might have been me.

The clamshell opening of the cave sits a couple hundred feet above the floor of the Great Basin Desert

During good growing years, when Indian populations were small, archaic life was good, for there was enough to eat. When times were bad and populations high, resources sparser and harder to find, life became poor to desperate. But out of these periods of stress came innovation, invention, and change.

A mosaic of experiences made up of sprigs of creosote bush and sagebrush, an owl feather and a grasshopper wing, and a chip of obsidian tied up with the song of a spadefoot toad, my own medicine bundle for my own ceremonies of passage.

The sky behind the mountains segues to a pale steely blue, without warmth, bending upward to dusk.