J. Anthony Lukas

Common Ground, as the subtitle promises, is the history of A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. The city is Boston; the central focus of the turbulence is the struggle over the degregation of its schools. Lukas is an intelligent and compassionate observer, a gifted writer who reveals events largely through the eyes of the black Twymons, the Irish-American McGoffs, and the Yankee Divers. He weaves skillfully back and forth with these three families and by book’s end each has had eight full chapters devoted to an account of the decade’s social history as they have experienced it. Interspersed with these chapters are those dealing with key public figures: Judge Garrity; Mayor Kevin White; Boston Globe editor Tom Winship; School Committee Chairwoman Louise Day Hicks; and Cardinal Medeiros.

Art history · Common ground · Globe · Irish · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Subtitle · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology