The Triple Package

I have just finished reading The Triple Package by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld, a heavily anecdotal book that tells us, as every reader of the New York Times now knows, what really determines success.

An irritating thing is the presentation of urban legends -- no dogs, no Cubans and so on -- and generalizations to support the authors' thesis.

Here is one example: "men like Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Delmore Schwatz, Saul Bellow, Celement Greenberg, Norman Podhoretz, and so many of the New York intellectuals who grew up excluded from anti-Semitic bastions of education and culture but went on to become famous writers and critics".

Alfred Kazin went to City College of New York when it was a selective institution. Norman Mailer went to Harvard at the age of 16 and, after serving in the army, to the Sorbonne. Delmore Schwartz attended Columbia, the University of Wisconsin and New York University and did postgraduate work at Harvard with Alfred North Whitehead. Saul Bellow was at the University of Chicago and then Northwestern. He was also also a postgraduate student at the University of Wisconsin. Clement Greenberg studied at Syracuse University. Norman Podhoretz was accepted by Harvard and NYU but went to Columbia which offered him a full scholarship. He went to Cambridge on a Fulbright and was offered a fellowship at Harvard which he turned down

Bellow famously endured several anti Semitic slights and sneers and no doubt did the others. But can we really say that were excluded from bastions of education?

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