Charles Murray & the Kid on the Chair

Charles Murray has made a splash with his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a book not as controversial as his previous blockbuster, 1994's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (produced with co-author Richard Herrnstein), but one interesting as a study of the social aspects of even rural life, such as in Salmon, Idaho, where I live. Some of the social pathologies of which Murray writes are also present in this small town in the Rockies that in many ways recalls Norman Rockwell's America. Readers familiar with Murray's work know that Coming Apart concerns America's rising white underclass, thus avoiding the howls of racism from the left that greeted The Bell Curve. His first book, Losing Ground (1984), a study of the social ravages of welfare dependency, was also a political lightning rod.