There are a lot of reasons to question a future of Chinese ascendancy. But your belief that 'all that Tiger Mother stuff that was such a scandal awhile back? In China, that's called "parenting"' is incorrect. As Alli_91 points out, the Chinese one child policy has turned Chinese parenting inside-out. One of the…

Polyandry as practiced in Tibet was hard on women. It's a society where marriages are arranged, often young. The woman, in effect, becomes servant and concubine to several men. When I first heard about it I had huge hopes for a system where the woman was more autonomous, and the situation was more equal, but that…

Well, there's Ishi as a cautionary tale, although hopefully a Neanderthal raised by humans wouldn't feel as isolated. [en.wikipedia.org]

The whole 'Mark Spitz' nickname thing was delightfully weird. I kept thinking of how evocative it was for me and how obscure it might be for someone twenty years younger than me. All the echoes of culture lost, and masks of identity. The writing is very very controlled, and yet the book is unhinged.

I was personally delighted that a character reached into her purse and pulled out a grenade. I love it when something viewed as female and silly (like a purse) used this way. It's not quite as good as the way the Terminator in the first movie is thwarted by a woman with no weapons (a drill press isn't usually…