Annal:1986 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1986. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

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…