by J. Anthony Lukas
Lukas, a Pulitzer-winning former New York Times reporter, spent seven years researching and writing this engrossing book on Boston's race problems. His interest is in both the political system and how, in times of such stressful change, people cope with great upheavals. The book opens with the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed. Lukas follows three families: a black woman and her six children, a poor Irish widow with seven children, and a young, Harvard-trained white lawyer who is so committed that he goes to work for Mayor Kevin White and buys a house in Boston's interracial South End. Mayor White's rise—he nearly got the Democratic nomination for Vice President in 1972—and his decline under the threat of scandal is a familiar sort of Boston tale. The story of Jonathan Kozol's firing from his teaching job in an integrated school because he gave the children a Langston Hughes poem is used as a graphic illustration of the gap that has existed between black and white. Lukas also gives a fascinating portrait of Louise Day Hicks, a complex woman around whom anti-integration forces rallied. The primary value of this 650-page volume is its authenticity as a portrait of a monumentally difficult problem. Lukas' symbolic ending is discouraging, partly because the lawyer gives up and moves his family to the suburbs. But the fact that this book exists at all is a cause for optimism. It is a document that could help bring about lasting change. (Knopf, $19.95)
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