Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In this thoughtful picture of racial and social conflict, Boston's fight over school integration in the 1960s and 1970s is portrayed through the battle's effects on three families.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Lukas accomplishes for urban history what Alex Haley did for black history by personalizing and chronicling the decade after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Lukas selects representatives of the three dominant ethnic groups in Boston-Yankee, black, and Irish-whose uneasy truce was shattered during this volatile decade, and weaves into their histories the lives of five prominent Boston figures representative of church, state, and citizen's groups. The urban crisis triggered by the busing issue is pivotal for Lukas. Each chapter focuses on one family or prominent citizen. Well written and carefully researched, Lukas's book succeeds in making the issues of the decade vivid and gripping. This book is an excellent introduction for students and the general public alike on how race, class, and ethnicity intersect in people's lives.-D. Campbell, Indiana University-Bloomington

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

An absorbing, you-are-there account of bad days in Boston: the city's violence-racked busing experiment, as experienced by three families--one Irish Catholic, one black, one Brahmin. Lukas refrains from taking sides in one of the 1970s' most controversial issues; rather, like a good ex-New York Times man, he gives us just the facts. Dramatic facts they are. In June 1974, US District Court Judge Arthur Garrity found the school system unconstitutionally segregated, and ordered a hastily-devised busing plan into effect that fall. But Boston, colonial cradle of liberty, was a city ""divided into ethnic enclaves, jealously guarded turfs where intruders of other nationalities, much less different races, were not welcome."" Opening day--and many days after that--saw boycotts and brawls, rocks thrown at schoolbuses and students frisked for weapons. Common Ground traces the reactions of each family in alternating chapters. To the McGoffs of working-class-and-proud-of-it Charlestown, the bused-in blacks are trespassing aliens; the widow McGoff marches in demonstrations of the local anti-busing group and daughter Lisa leads school walk-outs and sit-ins. Among her protests' targets: two daughters of welfare-dependent Rachel Twymon, who's raising six kids alone in a new and already crumbling Roxbury project. Meanwhile, the liberal-minded Divers settle in the South End, one of Boston's few interracial neighborhoods, where their two boys attend a progressive, integrated school. But the community spirit disintegrates under a mounting crime wave, and finally the Divers flee (not without mixed emotions) to a suburban house, complete with picket fence ""rearing its ivory spine against the world,"" Interspersed with their stories are chapters on key public figures: Mayor Kevin White, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, School Committee Chairwoman Louise Day Hicks. Though masterful mini-histories of Boston political and social institutions (probably written with an eye to excerpt), these sections interrupt the dramatic drive of the family sagas--clumsy intrusions of ""the larger picture,"" as if Lukas didn't think the ordinary people were interesting enough to carry the book. And tracing everyone's ancestry back to colonial days is purely self-indulgent padding; the nearly 700-page tome doesn't even get into Judge Garrity's order until one-third of the way through. But stick with it: despite the shaky structure, Common Ground reads like a living novel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.