Welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for Thursday, January 27th. Today we're going to be talking about Battle Him of the Tiger Mother by Yale Law Professor Amy Chua. If you haven't heard of this book, or at least the term tiger mother, you've truly been living in a cave these last few days. She's been on every single media outlet imaginable, including ours now. This is Hannah Rosen. I am an editor of Double X, and I'm joined here in the DC studio by Anne Holbert, who Slate's literary editor and who's herself working on a book about child prodigies. Hello, Anne. Hello, Hannah. And she wrote Slate's review of this book, by the way, which you should check out.

And in the New York studio, we have Nina Shen Rostogi, who writes Slate's browbeat, the culture blog on Slate.

Hi, Nina.

Hi, Anna.

So before we get to talking about Tiger Mother, which we are so excited to do, because even though there's been so much said, there is yet so much more to say, I want to make an announcement about the future of Slate's Audio Book Club. As many of you know, we put our February selection up to a listener of vote. This is something new we're going to do is put the books up for a vote. We'll offer you three books and you guys can vote. Nearly 1,500 of you already voted, and the winner is the novel Room by Emma Donahue, which tells the story of a woman and her five-year-old son who live isolated in a small room for reasons that will become clear

when we discuss it. And we will be talking about room on Monday, February 28th. So get to reading.

And before then, you'll have a chance to vote for the March book club choice. If you want to

suggest a nominee, drop us an email at Podcasts at Slate.com. That's Podcasts with an S at Slate.com by February 4th. We will pick

the top three, and then the voting will take place February 7th to 11th at slate.com

slash book club. So please come and vote with us. Okay, on to Tiger Mother. Let's just set the basics in case

people have forgotten them or have missed them. It's essentially, it's a parenting memoir by a woman named

Amy Chua, who's a Yale law professor who has two daughters, whose names are Sophia and Lulu.

She set out to make them into piano prodigies, basically, and geniuses and to get straight A's.

And she did this with a form of harsh parenting, which she is calling Chinese parenting.

There was an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal, and there are several stories that have been

circulating.

And just to give you a sample of some Amy Chua parenting, Nina, can you tell a couple of the

stories that have been out there?

Yeah, well, there are a couple that have gained a lot of notoriety. You know, one of the earliest

ones in the book concerns Amy Chua's younger daughter, Lulu, who is, you know, the sort of more

rebellious of the two girls. Lulu is three years old, and Amy Chua is trying to get her to

play a few notes on the piano piano and Lulu won't do it.

...