Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner) - Softcover

Lukas, J. Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394746163 ISBN 13: 9780394746166

Publisher: Vintage, 1986

Synopsis

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

About this title

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 the Inside Flap:

Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0394746163
• ISBN 13: 9780394746166
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688