Lukas's own career straddled two traditions in American journalism. For a book on racial and ethnic conflict, this could move readers from saying "How can they do that?" to "What would I do in their circumstances?"Īt the same time, the book owes much to Lukas's penchant for asking himself "How can I improve my journalism?" His answer, amid the conflicts of the sixties and seventies, was to survey the gap between American ideals and American realities. Lukas's prodigious research set the people of Common Ground in the multiple contexts of personal history, family history, and what he called "tribal" history-the history of their ethnic group and its memories. While Lukas's elegant writing gave the book a compelling narrative, the braiding of the three families' stories gave it a human dimension. In Common Ground, Lukas told the story of Boston's bitter struggles over busing for school integration through the experiences of three families-the African American Twymons, the working-class Irish American McGoffs, and the middle-class Yankee Divers. This is a virtue worth recovering today, when news organizations cultivate lucrative but narrow slices of the public and Web journalism caters to sharply exclusive points of view.
For all of Common Ground's reportorial and literary strengths, it is Lukas's ability to put his readers in other people's shoes that gives the book its enduring power. Perhaps most important, it reflects Lukas's rebellion against hard news and objectivity, which was invigorated by a trait that is rarely counted as a journalistic virtue-empathy. Imitated but never surpassed since its publication in 1985, it stands on Lukas's extraordinary talents as a reporter and writer and his subtle grasp of a complex conflict over racial integration. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families has been rightly praised as the work of a reporter who fused journalism and history to produce one of the best books ever written about an American city.
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