Loading...
20th out of 53 books
—
80 voters
My rating:
add to my books
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.
Paperback, 688 pages
Published
August 12th 1986
by Vintage
(first published 1985)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
885)
An exhaustive but fair examination of forced busing in Boston in 1973. The City of Boston's school commitee failed to follow mandated Federal government rules for desegregation and lost control of the city's schools. The management of the school system became subject to judicial receivership. Judge Garrity enforced the rule with busing and the results were on the national news nightly. Vitriol and egg throwing, it was an ugly time indeed.
Having just begun college I would find mysel...more
Having just begun college I would find mysel...more
view 1 comment
This is a book that I had to read for a college course and I thought it was okay, but it really took a long time to get through and I didn't care that much in the end. But when I read it again after college, I realized how great it really is.
It takes a look at three families: one poor black family, one poor Irish family, and one young well-off, idealistic "Yankee" family. The book explores how they deal with each other during Boston's bussing crises of the 1970's. Admittedly, th...more
It takes a look at three families: one poor black family, one poor Irish family, and one young well-off, idealistic "Yankee" family. The book explores how they deal with each other during Boston's bussing crises of the 1970's. Admittedly, th...more
Brendan O'connell
rated it
Recommends it for:
Teachers, Students with a high intereset in the subject matter, residents of Boston
As a resident of Boston who has lived or worked in two of the neighborhoods featured in this book, I appreciated the stories of how those neighborhoods have changed - and the forces that changed them. The fascinating stories of the neighborhoods and families, along with Lukas's storytelling choices provided me with a fulfilling experience. Lukas chose a family in each neighborhood and then told the story of that neighborhood through the family's experiences. As the title suggests, Boston's re...more
Here is a tale of the Boston Busing Crisis, and the racial tension that related to integration of the school systems in the 1960s and 1970s. The book follows three families: African American, Irish and an upper class Yankee family. There is a brief description of their background, and then narrations of the experience of each family when the school districts in Eastern Massachusetts began to bus African American students from the urban areas of Roxbury, Dorcester and Charlestown to the suburba...more
This may be the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It chronicles the lives of three families in Boston - Irish-American, African-American and WASP (don't mean that negatively!) from the night of the MLK riots in 1968 thru school desegregation. It's a great read of lawyers but also a great read for anyone interested in city issues - be they Boston's issues or any other urban areas. Would recommend to anyone and have already bought it for several friends!
Common Ground is one of the best books I can remember reading in the past few years. It is astoundingly thorough in its research and masterful in its use of perspectives in attempting to illuminate the urban crisis that consumed a great American city (Boston) in the 70s.
While Common Ground had been often described as "that book about busing in Boston," that issue is really just an entry point for Lukas's exploration of the the psychologies of people from diverse social class...more
While Common Ground had been often described as "that book about busing in Boston," that issue is really just an entry point for Lukas's exploration of the the psychologies of people from diverse social class...more
This is a masterpiece of a book. It is about Boston in the 1970s, though if it had been described to me only as such I'm sure I wouldn't have picked it up. Instead, it was lent to me by a good friend who recommended it highly.
Reading "Common Ground" felt a lot like watching "The Wire," and I can't help but wonder whether David Simon read Lukas' book and was influenced by it. CG is not as focused on crime per se as is The Wire, but it is a similar (and similarly succ...more
Reading "Common Ground" felt a lot like watching "The Wire," and I can't help but wonder whether David Simon read Lukas' book and was influenced by it. CG is not as focused on crime per se as is The Wire, but it is a similar (and similarly succ...more
An absolutely stunning book. Lukas follows three Boston families—one black and poor, one white and working class, one white and upper middle class—from 1968 through 1978, during the years in which the city was wracked by racial conflict and tension, particularly in regard to the forced busing that desegregated the public school system. Along the way, though, Lukas provides incredibly detailed histories of seemingly every major aspect of Boston—the Boston Globe, the Catholic Church and its archbi...more
This book is hands-down the most powerfully resonant book I've read since college. I devoured this book, and was changed by it. History is very far from my favorite reading genre. But this book was different for me in a number of crucial ways. For one thing, it concerns the place I've come to see as my home, greater Boston. So the events of this book take place in places that I actually am familiar with (unlike most history texts). I can visualize the geography described here, and while reading ...more
First third of the book read like a novel. As time wore on, the encyclopedic covering of all the players began to wear on me - perhaps it didn't suit my festive Christmas mood. It is still worth reading not only for it's insight into the busing crisis in Boston and a time of turmoil in the country, but also as a wonderful of history of Boston and how things work. Excellent writer. he unfortunately is dead; I'd be interested in an update on his last "Where are they now?" chapter. T...more
You would never expect the racism and trouble that occurred in the 1970's to be so prevalent. This book, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, is very puzzling and makes the reader want to keep going on with the book.
There were three families. the Twymons the McGoffs, and the Divers. these people were all an important part of the story and how it would be told in their eyes. The Tywmons were one ...more
There were three families. the Twymons the McGoffs, and the Divers. these people were all an important part of the story and how it would be told in their eyes. The Tywmons were one ...more
This is one of the best books I've ever read. Grand in scope and much more than the busing crisis in Boston. I particularly liked how it described how the same events were experienced so differently by the three families (e.g. the assassinations of JFK & MLK); something you know intuitively but don't truly appreciate until someone like J. Anthony Lukas informs you so compellingly. Also very effective was the way the author described the influence of outside sources such as the Catholic churc...more
I really found this slice of life book about the collision of race, class, gender, geography, etc.. of Boston during the time of the school de-segregation bus program absorbing, unbelievably intense and detailed, and surprising. This is a hefty book - nearly 700 pages. And the dedication to research, details, and trying to present all perspectives in an equally appealing manner really impressed me.
I was not alive during this movement and moved to Boston in 1999. Therefore, I knew some...more
I was not alive during this movement and moved to Boston in 1999. Therefore, I knew some...more
All I can say is -- wow. This took a hell of a long time to read, but I feel so much more educated now then before I read it. I started it thinking it would be abut the Boston busing crisis of the mid-1970s, but as one of the jacket blurbs says, the book is about that topic about as much as Moby-Dick is about whaling in New Bedford. The busing crisis is the hub of the book, but it's also about the social history of Boston starting with the pilgrims, the Brahmins, the establishment of the black a...more
Lukas deals with a huge subject here overlooking all of Boston for 10 years before and during the forced busing integration of the city. It shows just how gray real life can be. There's race, class, politics, culture, and the intersection of them all. Most interesting is how well he shows where ideals meet up with reality what happens. What's done to improve a situation often turns out counterproductive... going to help someone can do more harm than good.
An amazing book, written ...more
An amazing book, written ...more
Really interesting look at the decade from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies in Boston and the issues of race and class, particularly as they relate to the school busing decision. Very well-written, though somewhat difficult to get through simply because of the scope and the length of the work and number of people involved in the story. Having grown up in VA, I know much more about the history of race relations in the south, so the northern urban version of the story is eye-opening, to say the le...more
Teaching in the Boston Public Schools, I found that this book explained the history behind a lot of the race and neighborhood relations at play in Boston today, over 20 years after this book was written. The book follows three families, as they grapple with issues of the modern city, including race, education, integration, and neighborhoods:
- a working-class Irish family from Charlestown, who staunchly oppose busing
- a black family in the South End, struggling to hold their family t...more
- a working-class Irish family from Charlestown, who staunchly oppose busing
- a black family in the South End, struggling to hold their family t...more
I read this book years ago - my parents are teachers so it was lying around. It's about the desegregation of the Boston public schools from the perspective of a working class white family, a black family and the lawyer who's on the front lines. It provides great context to the move to integrate - and makes you think about how we're all supposed to live in this crazy ol' melting pot together.
This book is everything everyone says it is, including the Pulitzer judges (though I wonder if the author got a laugh when he won, given his description in the book about how JFK "won" the prize). The Irish-American local political dynamics rang true to what I know of a few Boston neighborhood meetings (which included one woman who always got up and cursed Arthur Garrity's name, 25 years later). Also, I had always thought that racism in Boston was more about classism, which was the con...more
For book group. This is a great, extremely well-researched book during the civil rights era (1960-1970s). It follows three different families and how they confronted the issue in the Boston area. It's long and sometimes hard to remember all the people mentioned, but very eye-opening and worth it!
In discussions about this book, I always refer to it as the best book I've ever read in my life. I would not be surprised if I refer to it in that way until the day I die. I remember reading it on the T (Boston's subway and above-ground rail system) several years ago, and having someone catch my eye and remark on the book I was reading -- not something that's really done in Boston. But the guy said something like, "Oh my goodness, that's the best book I've ever read." And I agreed....more
A well-paced, well-written book, I consider this a must-read for anyone who lived through school desegregation in Boston in the late '70s, or who wants to understand how busing impacted the lives of Bostonians and changed the dynamics operating within Boston neighborhoods.
I loved this book. It's a history following three different Boston families (and a whole lot of other people) through the bussing crisis of the 70s. I went into the book with very little knowledge of that history, but the book provides an incredibly detailed look at all of the factors that turned the issue of bussing into such a flashpoint. It's the personal stories that kept me invested through all 650ish pages, both of the families and of other figures like Mayor White and Louise Day Hicks. It...more
I read this amazing book many years ago and was reminded of it today with the passing of Boston Mayor Kevin White, who was at the center of the busing crisis. Lukas showed empathy and balance in his portrayal of three families affected by this issue.
If you live in Boston, you must read this book to gain understanding of this city. This book should be required reading in Boston schools.
Read this book if you are interested at all in education, racism and urban life. Yes, it is a bit dated but it's wroth the time.
Facinating book about Boston in the 1970s - it's a monster and took a summer to read but very interesting.
This was a heavy book. Although a novel, it was no fun to read.
Back to the fun of Spenser book.
Back to the fun of Spenser book.
Barbara
is currently reading it
This book is great. Am taking my time finishing it, but can't recommend it more highly.
THE book about (my) Boston. "The Power Broker" for the City on a Hill.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
Readers Also Enjoyed
Jay Anthony Lukas was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, probably best known for his 1985 book Common Ground : A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families a study of race relations and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid - 1970's.
Lukas began his professional journalism career at the Baltimore Sun, then moved to The New York Times. He stayed at...more
More about J. Anthony Lukas...
Lukas began his professional journalism career at the Baltimore Sun, then moved to The New York Times. He stayed at...more
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
