Rating: 
Summary: Minorities vs. Majorities
Review: The problems with Amy Chua's very interesting and original book are that 1. Even if most of the material is true, it fails so offer a solution (i.e. you cannot reverse democracy unless you substitute it by some kind of dictatorship, and then you would have most of Ms. Chua's readers crying foul too!)...And 2. that readers might take Ms. Chua's book too seriously and come to the conclusion, as Ms. Chua does herself (analyzing the Venezuelan case, for instance), that if you are dealing with a third world political crisis, it must necessarily be of ethnical nature, and democracy must have been imposed by "the west".The Venezuelan case has nothing to do with ethnic wars. This country is a veritable melting pot and most presidents, since 1959, have been of mixed race as most Venezuelans are, anyway. President Hugo Chavez has appealed to the gullibility and ignorance of the concerned citizens of other countries (including America's black caucus) to portray his country's popular uprising against his inept and corrupt government, as a coup orchestrated by the white oligarchies...These white oligarchies, for Ms. Chua's information, all but disappeared in Venezuela after more than a century of civil wars during the 19th century...Oil provided later a fast track for people of all origins (and skin hues) into high degree education and opportunities (this land of opportunity stopped being so about 20 years ago due to a smothering statism that has arrived to its final crisis with Mr. Chavez)...Globalization, on the contrary, is what keeps the majority opposition alive and kicking in spite of the enormous resources (and the support of the army) at the disposal of this president in a country where the wealthiest entity, by far, is the State. Ms. Chua does not seem to realize that the only way to better democracy is...more democracy!
Rating: 
Summary: Refreshing and well argued
Review: This book is a quick and interesting read. The author presents a simple, clear and logical hypothesis and proceeds to explain it in a clear and honest manner. The book is full of some very interesting stories and history you may not have be previously aware of; in particular from areas of the world that you don't often see in the news. The book is a refreshing change to a lot of the "globalisation" tracts as it focuses on real life and reality rather than some nice handwavy economic theory.
There are some real insights in this book that I have never heard stated before by any of the "experts". It also managed to give me some new insights into the recent political history of my own country (Australia).
The chapter on "why they hate us" (which discusses 9/11 etc) left me with mixed feelings. The central argument is great; but as a non-US reader I felt the author's nationality coloured her arguments. Readers from outside the US may find the tone of this chapter strange... she seems to avoid the obvious conclusion (that the US is just another selfcentred dominant minority) and instead paints it as some kine of huge misunderstanding. The next chapter on what the US can do to prevent terrorism borders on the ridiculous. She suggests a typical American response; all you need is some good PR!
Lets face it, the world is a contest, and at a certain scale moral arguments are irrelevant. Its kill or be killed :-)
The book does get slightly repetitive toward the end, as the author strugges to find more examples that back up her argument. But overall I would recommend this book to anyone who is unimpressed by the usual commentary on this subject and would like something more hardheaded.
The next logical step from this book is an analysis of why these dominant minorities form in the first place. This would make for an interesting book in itself.
Rating: 
Summary: dumb
Review: This book is silly. Just plain silly. It's like it was written by a 17-year-old. It's the kind of book that makes me sorry that I'm the kind of person who insists on finishing every book I start, since Chua has wasted irretrievable hours of my life.
I read a great number of books about politics and current events and, while there is a great deal of mediocrity out there, this book is in a class of its own. It's just silly.
Chua siezes on a paradigm and then bends everything to fit it, despite her protests that she is carefully avoiding such reductionism.
The book could have been boiled down to a monograph of about 10 pages; for what we have here, really, is just another Washington Post essay -- and not a very insightful one.
For a much better treatment of the same ideas (er, same IDEA, that is, her Ahabian fetish with "market-dominant minorities"), I would instead recommend Niall Ferguson's "Colossus," which covers all of the same territory, although in a much more substantial and well-researched fashion.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoughtful, thorough and well-written piece of work!
Review: This challenging and satisfying book offers a thought-provoking explanation for the uneasy coexistence of the free markets and democracy in many parts of the developing world.
Overall, Chua shows that what is being advocated in current international development policy circles - rapid liberalization and universal suffrage of destitute populations without a social safety net - is a political experiment that has not yet proved workable in history. I hope that visionary leaders in developing countries will give this book's thesis the attention it deserves and advocate a more nuanced approach to rapid development.
I have only one concern about the work - For Kenya, the "outsider" sources used were scanty and outdated, giving the entire section a sweeping feel. The description of Kenya's white minority ("Kenyan Cowboys" or "KCs"s ) for example. This lot (while still a pain) are much less "spoilt" in reality than they come off in the book. If anything, there is a notion - accurate or not - that KCs are less exploitative than both "native" Africans and Indians as employers (or husbands, for that matter).
The book also overlooked a key reason why market-dominant minorities ("MDM"s) are resented: their general contempt for and dehumanization of other groups. This is a crucial ingredient in the hatred and violence cycle - with inequality being only one (small) piece. Increased patriotism, philanthropy and economic affirmative action will go some of the way to heal the rift between MDMs and their local communities, but the true answer to this political quagmire is in the personal realm, where prejudice, fear and bitterness thrive.
Rating:
Summary: Good But Limited
Review: This is an excellent overview of how class and ethnicity intertwine to the point where concepts like liberalism and democracy become contradictions. Yet I would posit they do not have to be, except as a market society makes them so.
Throughout the book Ms. Chua engaged in standard academic cliches re: socialism or "planning systems," prefacing her statements with "disastrous." How and why said systems were disastrous - and for whom - is never empirically demonstrated.
Also she neglects to mention that "market-dominant majorities" - precisely because of their alienation from the majority, like Jews in Eastern Europe or the Chinese in Southeast Asia - were often the vanguards of revolutionary movements and Communism in these areas.
But overall still a good read.
Rating:
Summary: This is the best a Yale Law Professor can do?
Review: This is nothing more than belly-aching about how globalization caused the death of Chua's grandmother. This is a poorly organized work that attempts to claim that ethnic violence in Asia is a recent creation of American style capitalism. Perhaps Chua forgot many thousands of years of ethnic violence in Asia (and elsewhere) that arose before the advent of globalization. For Chua globalization is the cause for this violence, but in my book globalization is simply an excuse.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book!
Review: Through this book Amy Chua has taught me so much about the failure of free market and democracy in much of the Third World. This is an excellent book that adds to, rather than contradicts, the conventional U.S. theory about exporting our system to the rest of the world. I would point out a couple of shortcomings of the book for other readers. (1) The cultural, political and economic legacy (not to mention the brutality) of European colonialism is inadequately analyzed. The fact that the Chinese and Lebanese have become so successful in many parts of the world owes a great deal to the historical circumstance in which these immigrant minorities collaborated with and profited from the oppressive colonial regimes. (2) The comparison between Jewish people and the overseas Chinese is rather superficial. In addition to the collaborationist colonial role they played, the Chinese differ from the Jews in that the former, perhaps out of their sense of culutral/racial superiority, refuse to regard their "indigenous" countrymen as equal. Only when assimilated successfully by the indigenous government, the Chinese seem to accept the fact that they are a part of their adopted country.
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