Common Ground

Summary

A monumental work of narrative nonfiction that follows three Boston families—Black, Irish-American, and Yankee Brahmin—through the city's wrenching 1970s school desegregation crisis. Lukas weaves their daily lives together with the courtroom history, neighborhood politics, and class fractures that produced the busing standoff. The result is a study of how race, class, and place collide in American cities, and it is still taught as a model of long-form reporting.