Lukas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was formerly a correspondent for The New York Times, works with relentless

Of focus, centers of gravity, from which hundreds of narrative traceries curl off in directions of their own. The three families, then, serve as points It is a portrait in the sense that it gathers an immense assembly within a given frame, but it is a story in the sense that all of the parts are in constant motion. Portrait may, in fact, be too static an image. Them - the key figures in the piece - are all of the neighborhoods, parishes, institutions and other clusters of people that together constitute the cells of the living city. Richard Cardinal Cushing and his successor Humberto Cardinal Medeiros and Louise Day Hicks, a member of the Boston School Committee who became a symbol of opposition to busing far beyond the municipal boundaries of Boston. Arthur Garrity Jr., who issued the famous court order mandating busing Kevin White, the Mayor of Boston Thomas Winship, editor of The Boston Globe In the portrait are several of the principal players in the school crisis - Judge W. Lukas's account - a young Yankee couple named Joan and Colin Diver who became deeply involved in the problems of the city, a struggling and devoted black mother of six named Rachel Twymon,Īnd a young widow of Irish extraction, Alice McGoff, trying to raise seven children in her community of Charlestown, which is largely made up of working-class whites in the old part of town, the site of Bunker Hill. Standing in the foreground of that portrait are the members of three families Its focal event is the Boston school integration crisis of the middle 1970's, but it is the portrait of a city, the portrait of a time. Martin Luther King Jr., and then ranges across thatġ0-year span. It begins with local reactions to the shooting of the Rev. ''Common Ground'' deals with Boston during the decade from 1968 to 1978. Anthony Lukas could master so much material and make such good sense of it is one of the book's marvels. It has the feel of a project that simply grew until it had almost taken on a life of its own - ideas generating ideas, information creating information, the study itself maturing according toĪ calendar of its own devising.

THIS is a huge and marvelous work, many years in the making. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy Kai Erikson Kai Erikson is the editor of The Yale Review and a professor of sociology and American studies at Yale University.ĬOMMON GROUND A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. September 15, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article

Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas