Common Ground

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award
Winner of the American Book Award

In this extraordinary prize-winning work of reportage, Lukas brings to life the school integration crisis in Boston and by extension the crisis of urban America in the ten years following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"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

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, The Washington Post

"A huge and marvelous work." —Kai Erikson, front page, The New York Times Book 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 that Moby-Dick is about whaling in New Bedford." —Robert B. Parker, Chicago Tribune

"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

"A big book—monumental in scope, rich in historical detail, challenging in its conclusions and compassionate in its portraiture of the three families: the black Twymons, the Irish McGoffs, and the Yankee Divers." —Fox Butterfield, The New Republic