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Coming Apart: The State Of White America, 1960-2010 (2012)

by Charles Murray(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0307453421 (ISBN13: 9780307453426)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Crown Forum

review 1: As one reviewer says the book "Coming Apart" offers a very effective analysis of the diverging economic prospects & social values of American society since 1963.He brings together 4 basic themes.1. Divergence of the American classes resulting from a conflict in the cultural & social values of those from the "New" upper class opposed to those of the "new" lower class.2. Decline in marriage, religion, industriousness & traditional values of the "American Culture"3. Income inequalities leading to some form of an advanced European welfare state in the US.4. Isolation or geographic separation of the "new" classes & the resultant loss of civic & social responsibility between them.The author does a great job describing many aspects of our society & culture. He gives impressive st... moreats not only showing the current state of our society but clear indicators as to how we got here. He also gives some good insight concerning societies attitudes, based on behaviors & practices.The decline of our culture, I believe, is due to a departure from the Bible as a basis for thought, morals, ways of living & relating, etc. but the affects of this departure will be displayed & manifested in many & various ways, which I believe Murray reveals.A lot of good, thought provoking information on the current status of our society which leads us to better understand in what ways our culture affects our beliefs, behaviors & attitudes
review 2: This book has earned many 1-star reviews and many 5-star reviews. I don't like to present myself as some kind of political Goldilocks, but I must say that I disagree with most of Murray's political leanings and assumptions but I also learned a lot from this book. So three stars it is.The parts of this book about elites are all stuff I (and probably you) have heard before. Educated people who have jobs that require some measure of skill and intelligence tend to live close to one another, associate with one another, have the same tastes and values and preferences, etc. Murray backs this up with some useful data and makes the serious point that it was not always thus. Though there have always been rich people who lived their own way, there were educated people who earned decent salaries with their brains, somewhat more money than the laborers who worked with their backs, but the managers' and the laborers' lives weren't all that different. They lived near one another, sent their kids to the same schools, attended the same churches. But since the 60s, the elites separated from the herd.That brings us to the second, far more interesting and disturbing section of the book, which is about the non-elites and how much their lives suck. The data is crushing in most senses of the word. It wasn't always like this. But the separation from the educated professionals has made the non-educated non-elites' lives worse in every conceivable way. (I call them "non-educated non-elites because there is no satisfying term for them, which is significant in and of itself.)The people who gave this book 1 star seem to have read an entirely different book than I did. They see Murray blaming the poors for being lazy and stupid. I see him simply noting how the American landscape has changed. We can play chicken-and-egg with values and economic conditions all day but that's just what we do while other people's lives get worse. I have many of my own thoughts on this subject but they don't really matter. I think this book is worth reading, not just for the charts, but because it ends with Murray's open admission of the limitations of his own politics. He calls himself a "libertarian" and he says that government shouldn't get involved in things like this, but that leads him to admit that he is helpless before the problems he has just clearly diagnosed. Libertarianism depends a huge amount on what's called "civil society" to provide what a welfare state tries to provide, and when civil society goes away, it's hard to get it back or find anything adequate to replace it. Libertarianism is like a political version of Christian Science.A side issue (that's not really a side issue) on method and discipline: this book focuses on what Murray calls "white America" (sorry I didn't get into race in this review... you can read almost all the others for that) in 1960-2010. Murray is a sociologist, but what that really means is that he's a highly opinionated journalist who can do regression analyses. What he should be -- or what we need -- is a historian. It would really help if he could, y'know, talk about the stuff that happened around 1960 that brought about these changes, good and then also make meaningful points about how this is all somehow different from 1860 or 1760, and/or how America is different from other countries, etc. But we don't get any of this, so "Coming Apart" is simultaneously far-reaching and exceedingly narrow. less

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