The Boston busing crisis of the 1970s was one of America's most volatile confrontations over race, class, and public education, and J. Anthony Lukas tells its story not through politicians or policy analysts but through three families whose lives were upended by a federal court order to desegregate the city's schools. The families come from different worlds within the same city: the Divers, a Black family in the South End striving for the educational opportunities that integration promised; the McGoffs, an Irish Catholic family in Charlestown fiercely opposed to sending their children across town; and the Twymons, a middle-class family navigating the fractures from yet another vantage point. By following these families over several years, Lukas reveals how the busing order exposed fault lines that ran far deeper than race alone — divisions of neighborhood identity, economic anxiety, political abandonment, and competing visions of what equality actually requires. The book reconstructs the texture of daily life in Boston's neighborhoods with extraordinary specificity: the parish churches, the housing projects, the school committee meetings that erupted into shouting matches, the rocks thrown at buses carrying Black children into white neighborhoods. Lukas shows how well-intentioned policy collided with the realities of communities that felt they had no voice in decisions reshaping their lives. The result is a deeply reported work of narrative nonfiction that uses one city's crisis to illuminate enduring questions about how America distributes opportunity and who bears the cost of social change.