'The Still Point of the Turning World' The Still Point of the Turning WorldBy Emily Rapp(The Penguin Press; 256 pages; $25.95)Emily Rapp coined the term "dragon mom" to refer to the fierce love of mothers of children with terminal diseases. When Rapp learned that her son Ronan had Tay-Sachs disease - a degenerative, fatal condition - she recognized how dehumanizing and pervasive Chua's brand of aggressive, goal-oriented parenting had become. Rapp threw out her parenting manuals, which contained no tips on how to raise a dying child, and wrote "The Still Point of the Turning World," an impassioned and searing account of loving - and preparing to lose - her baby. Rapp, born with a condition that led to the amputation of one foot, despises the notion that people with disabilities exist to teach the able-bodied a lesson. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Rapp combines an essayist's willingness to lay herself bare on the page, a theologian's search to plumb the mysteries of life and a poet's precision. Each day I picked apart my grief with a little knife; I combed through it; I boiled it in petri dishes and tried to blow it up. A lot of people were persuaded by Chua's harsh methods of wringing quantifiable results out of her kids in a competitive world.