Common Ground : A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities." "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 Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston. The book traces the history of three families: the working-class African-American Twymons, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the middle-class Yankee Divers. It gives brief genealogical histories of each families, focusing on how the events they went through illuminated Boston history, before narrowing its focus to the racial tension of the 1960s and the 1970s. Through their stories, Common Ground focuses on racial and class conflicts in two Boston neighborhoods: the working-class Irish-American enclave of Charlestown and the uneasily integrated South End.

Winner of 3 different awards, this is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Book Award, this book examines school integration in Boston from the vantage points of three familiesone black and two white. PW stated that Common Ground is ``highly readable and brings us as close as we are likely to get to the average person's experiences of urban racial tensions.'' (September)

Describes events in the lives of three families during the 1968 Boston school integration crisis. [This] is a story of the busing crisis in Boston.-http://www.loc.gov/catdir