The scars of busing.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Desegregation in Boston

Over the years, this magazine has been saying that book-length nonfiction that combines the rich humanity of novels with journalism's reportorial and moral zeal can be the very best way to illuminate public affairs--to get discussion of politics and government out of the realm of caution, posturing, and self-interest. With that well-loved Washington Monthly gift for repeating ourselves infinitely when we care about something, we've again and again cited the same book as an example of what we mean: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. Now, at last, there's another book to add: Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukas.

Common Ground is a very long, dense, richly detailed account of the first two years of busing in Boston in the mid-seventies, told by interweaving the public events with the stories of three families, one poor black, one poor white, and one upper-middle-class white liberal. What makes it such a great achievement isn't Luka's writing, which is serviceable, or his thinking, on which more later, but the combination of two other qualities: thorough reporting and humanity. Writers about lower-class people whom we think of as towering figures--Jacob Riis, John Reed, Jack London, James Agee--in fact were never able to triumph over their impulse to chide, or excuse, or recoil in horror, and achieve a true empathy for their subjects. Lukas does, through both doggedness and purity of purpose. He wants not to prove a theory, or to posture as a journalist-hero, but to explain what happened.

As everyone must know by now, it's a tragic story. Busing in Boston exposed how bad race relations really are in the urban North. It set off a wave of white resistance as ugly as anything that happened in Alabama and Mississippi in the sixties and in the long run seems only to have hastened the exodus of the white middle class from the Boston public school system. In his retelling, Lukas makes it seem even more tragic than that. By constantly setting the realities of busing against the intellectual and spiritual highmindedness for which Boston is famous (this culminates in a horrifying set-piece about a black-white rumble on July 4, 1976), he paints a much darker picture than we're accustomed to of America's relationship with its stated basic principles. One finishes this book feeling almost completely hopeless about the possibility of healing race and class hostilities in this country.

Lukas puts busing in the context of a longstanding tension...