Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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)
Robert B. Parker
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 bussing in Boston is a bit like saying that Moby-Dick is about whaling in New Bedford.
—Robert B. Parker Chicago Tribune
Jonathan Yardley
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
Fox Butterfield
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 New Republic
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
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.
—The New York Times
From the Publisher
"A huge and marvelous work." —Kai Erikson, front page, The New York Times Book Review
"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
