Awards
Winner 1986 Pulitzer Prize
Winner 1985 National Book Awards
Winner 1985 National Book Critics Circle Awards
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.
Review
"...highly readable and brings us as close as we are likely to get to the average person's experiences of urban racial tensions...." Publishers Weekly
Review
"This is a huge and marvelous work, many years in the making...the portrait of a city, the portrait of a time." Kai Erickson, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Lukas wins the toughest exacta in book writing: a hypnotizing, meticulously reported account of his protagonists combined with a compelling take on the big issues at the heart of the story race and class." Jeffrey Toobin, Salon.com
Review
"A book of such force and clarity that its just praise would require language long rendered empty by jacket blurbs. To say that Common Ground is about busing in Boston is a bit like saying Moby Dick is about whaling in New Bedford". Robert B. Parker, Chicago Tribune
Review
"An American classic, a book that will find a place not merely in the shelves where our national history is recorded but also in those where our literature is kept." Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
Review
"A big book monumental in scope, rich in historical detail, challenging in its conclusions and compassionate in its portraiture of the three families
" Fox Butterfield, The New Republic
Review
"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
Synopsis
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestsellingCommon 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"