It's a paean to parenting of the extreme kind and is likely to generate extreme responses.

Chinese American Amy Chua's first-person narrative about how she raised her two daughters (their father is the Jewish-American lawyer and novelist, Jed Rubenfeld) in New Haven, Connecticut, in the "Chinese way", sounds so retrogressive that one's not even sure if she really means it.

As often happens with immigrants trying to hang on to their native roots, Chua's idea of "Chinese parenting" is based on a mangled view of what Confucius might have suggested when he stressed the importance of filial devotion in keeping the institution of the family in place.

Contemptuous of liberal Western notions about teaching children the fun way, Chua drove her daughters, Sophia and Lulu, toward academic and musical stardom with a manic frenzy. Her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin), is a memorial to her achievements - and, to be fair, also to the failures Chua is candid enough to expose.

The younger daughter, Lulu, eventually got the better of her in the protracted mother-daughter struggle.

Chua - an accomplished Harvard Law School professor and writer of highly esoteric books with such hortatory titles as Day of Empire: How Hyper-powers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall - had a meticulously chalked-out game plan for her daughters, whom she was determined to turn into musical prodigies.

Here's an inventory of what the Chua offspring were never allowed to do:

Author Amy Chua with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, and their daughters Lulu (left), 14, and Sophia, 18, in their Connecticut home. Lorenzo Ciniglio / CFP

Attend a sleepover

Have a playdate

Be in a school play

Complain about not being in a school play

Watch TV or play computer games

Choose their own extracurricular activities

Get any grade less than an A

Not be the No 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

Play any instrument other than the piano or violin

Not play the piano or violin

Chua would, literally, breathe down their necks, even as her daughters, aged about 5 when they were made to take up the instruments, would practice for hours on end. Refusing to comply was never an option.

Their mother threatened to burn all their stuffed animals unless they got each note rendered with flawless nuance and tonality. Achievements were hardly ever rewarded, or even acknowledged, and anything less than 100 percent perfect was, always, castigated in the most severe terms.

This, Chua insists, was in keeping with the time-tested "Chinese" model of pushing children toward excellence. Never mind if one's childhood is relegated to a series of rigorous practice sessions, without a day's break - even on family vacations abroad - and the bad vibes it created between family members, at each other's throats given half a chance. Musicality could just as well have flown out the window.

Chua's utter lack of respect and sensitivity toward her preteen kids is quite bewildering. For example, she would fling birthday cards her daughters wrote to her right back in their faces, saying they weren't good enough.

It was Chua's dream that Sophia would play the piano at Carnegie Hall, which she did, as a young teen. It was her dream that Lulu would enter the pre-college program for talented musicians at the Julliard School of Music at an unprecedented young age, which she almost did, impressing one of the judges who signed her on for private coaching. It was also her dream to have their two household pets - Samoyeds Coco and Pushkin - compete with fellow canines and emerge on top of the neighborhood dog heap.

Coco and Pushkin proved slightly less compliant than Sophia and Lulu. Meanwhile, Chua is on the lookout for a third dog.