Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Sunlight struck the gnarled limbs outside his window, casting a thicket of light and shadow on the white clapboards..." (more)
Key Phrases: busing crisis, senior banquet, South End, South Boston, Bunker Hill (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The climax of this humane account of 10 years in Boston that began with news of Martin Luther King's assassination, is a watershed moment in the city's modern history--the 1974 racist riots that followed the court-ordered busing of kids to integrate the schools. To bring understanding to that moment, Lukas, a former New York Times journalist, focuses on two working-class families, headed by an Irish-American widow and an African-American mother, and on the middle-class family of a white liberal couple. Lukas goes beyond stereotypes, carefully grounding each perspective in its historical roots, whether in the antebellum South, or famine-era Ireland. In the background is the cast of public figures--including Judge Garrity, Mayor White, and Cardinal Cushing--with cameo roles in this disturbing history that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Book Award, this book examines school integration in Boston from the vantage points of three familiesone black and two white. PW stated that Common Ground is "highly readable and brings us as close as we are likely to get to the average person's experiences of urban racial tensions."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Ed edition (August 12, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394746163
• ISBN-13: 978-0394746166
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #106,951 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best nonfiction book I have ever read, March 14, 2000

By A Customer

This book is a magnificant work -- the best work of nonfiction I have ever read. It captures the essence of the problems facing urban America in a compelling, meticulous story. It is about America, the world, race and racism, class and elitism, sociology, education, psychology -- it has it all. And it is breathtakingly entertaining.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A monumental effort... with intelligence & heart, April 30, 1999

By A Customer

I really appreciate the honesty in this book. Lukas did not try to create villans or martyrs, he simply told the truth. This book is a must-read for anyone who lives in a racially diverse American city. If you like this book, you'll also like UNEASY ALLIANCES by Paul Frymer. Wei Chen

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars one of the best political books I ever read - 6 stars!!!!, May 6, 2005

By	Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is an absolutely magnificent tableau of American politics in all its complexity and ambiguity. Lukas investigated the lives of three families in a fundamental controversy on the future of America: forced school busing.

The first family are brahmans, from Harvard Law and straight into the Mayor's office in a moment of idealism that would forever change his career. He is a mechanic of political change, who is trying to lead a good and honorable life. Then there is a working class Irish family, from the other side of the tracks. The widowed mother becomes a great adversary of the process underway, in no way racist but opposed for very practical and personal reasons to forced busing. Finally, there is a black family, struggling to get by amidst dashed hopes and pathological mental illness, the supposed benificiariers of a great social experiment. The portrayals of these lives - all real and thoroughly investigated by an absolutely first-rate investigative journalist - are beyond novellistic realism. The personalities are so vivid and well drawn that it is simply astonishing.

Then there is the wider political/historical milieu, Boston in the early 1970s. Lukas stops at nothing to create a composite picture: there is the mayor Kevin White (whom I was astonished to learn was considered by Jimmy Carter as a running mate in 1976), Ted Kennedy, and scores of others including the archdiscese and various minor politician-demagogues hoping to make a career out of the crisis. The portrait is as beautiful and detailed as the Sistine Chapel, exposing the best, the worst, and the unexpected in American politics of the period. Lukacs' talent to do all of this is simply extraordinary. Late in the writing, I learned, he had to throw out one of the three families and begin the entire process over again in the name of thoroughness. No wonder he won a pulitzer.

This book also spoke to me personally. I was in Boston for part of the time, in the very neighborhood where the brahmans lived as a personal social experiment, and I witnessed many of the events as they unfolded. Lukacs' evocation of it all struck me as entirely accurate, pitch perfect to where people were coming from and what they hoped and feared. As such, this book is a crucible of the American race conundrum, a turning point of the greatest political import, perhaps equal to the Vietnam war protests.

And the writing! It is elegant and clear beyond imagination, approaching what I would call genius, the product of an unusually driven mind. The characters are so vivid that I will refelct on them until the day I die. This is destined to become a classic, like Tacitus or Thucydides - the quality is truly that high. I have read HUNDREDS of political-historical books, and this one ranks as near the top as a handful.

Recommended as a true must-read. Get it, make the effort, for an excpetional reading experience.