Just finished a thought-provoking book by author Charles Murray entitled  “Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960 – 2010“.  His main premise is that white America is becoming segregated into an upper and lower class. The upper class is highly educated and likely, according to his statistics, to produce highly intelligent offspring as well.

Murray looks at four elements that he believes demonstrate why the lower class is expanding. They no longer marry at the rates they once did, leading to a high rate of out of wedlock childbirth. They cannot afford the kind of Ivy League education the upper classes attain and they no longer have the industriousness of their ancestors, choosing to live off of government handouts in lieu of seeking employment. They also have lost their “religiosity” and no longer attend religious services on a regular basis.

Murray believes these differences have led to a major gap between the classes, in which neither side has a true understanding of  the others’ lives.

This presidential election year has been filled with accusations that certain candidates are out of touch with “the common man” and that other candidates want to create a socialist society in which individuals are entirely dependent on the federal government for all aspects of their lives. Whether you agree with him or not, Murray’s latest is another thought-provoking analysis  of current societal trends.

Pure is set sometime in the near future after nuclear detonations have destroyed the world as we know it. A select few escaped the blast because they had taken refuge in a dome. The people in the dome are referred to as “Pures” because the people who survived the blasts outside the dome are disfigured in very unusual ways. These people have been fused to inanimate objects, animals and each other. The people who live in the dome call them “Wretches.” Pressia is a teenager who instead of a right hand has a baby doll’s head. She has just turned sixteen and awaits the time when she is forced to either join the Operation Religious Salvation (ORS) or be killed by them. Her life changes dramatically after she meets Bradwell, a boy who has survived on his own since he was nine, and then, Partridge, a “Pure,” who has escaped the dome to find his mother. Baggott has created a cruel, but beautiful world that seems so plausible even with the bizarre mutations that litter the landscape. Pure stands out among the ever increasing numbers of post-apocalyptic fiction.