"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
"I read this Pulitzer winner in my early 30s and couldn't believe the depth of the reporting and writing ... Common Ground is about Boston's 1970s busing crisis. But it's really a depiction of America — endlessly fractured by race, politics, and the church."
Theater news and reviews from Broadway and beyond.
With “Common Ground Revisited,” a new play looking back at the J. Anthony Lukas book about busing in Boston, the Huntington Theater Company is reconsidering a history that can feel very present, and very distant. https://t.co/tM89bgrQBe
Curator @Niemanfdn for journalism @Harvard. @PulitzerPrize investigative. @Poynter trustee. If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Not you, Caroline.
Good story about complexities of bringing Anthony Lukas’s landmark Common Ground to the stage. Nearly 40 yrs after publication of the @PulitzerPrizes-winning book, telling the story of race, class & busing in Boston remains a monumental undertaking https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/21/arts/connecting-busing-era-today-common-ground-revisited-follows-long-complicated-path-stage/
"A book of such force and clarity that its just praise would require language long rendered empty by jacket blurbs. To say that Common Ground is about busing in Boston is a bit like saying that Moby-Dick is about whaling in New Bedford." --Robert B. Parker, Chicago Tribune
"An American classic, a book that will find a place not merely in the shelves where our national history is recorded but also in those where our literature is kept." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post
"A big book--monumental in scope, rich in historical detail, challenging in its conclusions and compassionate in its portraiture of the three families: the black Twymons, the Irish McGoffs, and the Yankee Divers." --Fox Butterfield, The New Republic