From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1985. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
J. Anthony Lukas
The climax of this humane account of 10 years in Boston that began with news of Martin Luther King’s assassination, is a watershed moment in the city’s modern history—the 1974 racist riots that followed the court-ordered busing of kids to integrate the schools. To bring understanding to that moment, Lukas, a former New York Times journalist, focuses on two working-class families, headed by an Irish-American widow and an African-American mother, and on the middle-class family of a white liberal couple. Lukas goes beyond stereotypes, carefully grounding each…
