Joe Queenan in The Wall Street Journal has a good article entitled “Why Italian Moms Are the Best”. It’s about this ridiculous fad, started by Amy Chua, of books claiming what groups produce the best mothers.  The article does a pretty good job pointing out the absurdities of it all, even if it does sort of engage in them at the same time.

I’m getting pretty tired of this stuff myself. It’s a stupid concept. Logically, if one group consistently produced the best mothers, it would also consistently produce the best sons and daughters, and therefore be immediately and obviously superior to all the others. That this is not the case shows that the different groups each have their advantages and disadvantages. Everyone already knew that. This is just a way to sell books by giving them provocative titles about a subject people are sensitive about.