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

By J. Anthony Lukas and Anthony J. Lukas

Book Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities.

An epic of American city life...a story of such hypnotic specificity that we re-experience all the shades of hope and anger, pity and fear that living anywhere in late 20th-century America has inevitably provoked. --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394746163
• ISBN13: 9780394746166
• Release Date: August 1986
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Best Modern History of Boston Ever

In you are interested in modern Boston history, and why Boston is the way it is, there is no better book. The subject of this book is busing, but that is only one (important) element of the book. Excellent, well-researched overview of Boston's different ethnic clans, geography, religious groups (the most fascinating history of the Boston Roman Catholic Church I have ever read), and Boston culture. Extremely well-written. I've lived in Massachusetts/Boston my entire life. I regret not reading this book earlier.

one of the best political books I ever read - 6 stars!!!!

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.

The best nonfiction book I have ever read

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.

A Brialliant Work

Lukas manages to present three views of the tumultuous events in Boston in the 1960s without placing value judgements upon the viewpoints himself. He simply tells the story as it happened by presenting each family's view -- a poor black family's, a poor white family's, and an upper class white family's -- of the situation as it appeared to them at the time. His book presents a window into the hearts and minds of the people that made the story; it is a rare treat.

A monumental effort... with intelligence & heart

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