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The moving, untold family story behind Abraham Zapruder's film footage of the Kennedy assassination and its lasting impact on our world.

Abraham Zapruder didn't know when he ran home to grab his video camera on November 22, 1963 that this single spontaneous decision would change his family's life for generations to come. Originally intended as a home movie of President Kennedy's motorcade, Zapruder's film of the JFK assassination is now shown in every American history class, included in Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit questions, and referenced in novels and films. It is the most famous example of citizen journalism, a precursor to the iconic images of our time, such as the Challenger explosion, the Rodney King beating, and the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. But few know the complicated legacy of the film itself.

Now Abraham's granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder, is ready to tell the complete story for the first time. With the help of the Zapruder family's exclusive records, memories, and documents, Zapruder tracks the film's torturous journey through history, all while American society undergoes its own transformation, and a new media-driven consumer culture challenges traditional ideas of privacy, ownership, journalism, and knowledge. Part biography, part family history, and part historical narrative, Zapruder demonstrates how one man's unwitting moment in the spotlight shifted the way politics, culture, and media intersect, bringing about the larger social questions that define our age.

Reviewer: carilynp
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Articulately and intelligently, she defines the films’ place in American history
Review: While I have been an admirer of the Kennedys for as long as I can remember and while I did not live during the time of President Kennedy’s assissinaton, I’ve read enough about it to have a sense of the toll it took on our country and how it affected people on such a personal level. What I did not know was the back story of the Zapruder film, nor had I given much thought to its impact on the evolution of the birth of media frenzy and our fascination with watching such horrific events prior to the internet age. After reading Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter Alexandra Zapruder’s book TWENTY-SIX SECONDS: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE ZAPRUDER FILM, I am even more deeply moved knowing the film’s history, Mr. Zapruder’s background, and the weight this film had on his family for decades.Ms. Zapruder, a historian and author, took on this project of sharing her family’s background as well as the history of the film. Articulately and intelligently, she defines the films’ place in American history. It is fascinating to see how it all unravels, from the day that her grandfather went to work on November 22, 1963, to the play-by-play of watching/filming the president’s motorcade and the background of the Zapruder family’s admiration of the Kennedys, and the Zapruder history, which puts everything in perspective. The book goes on, into great detail about how Zapruder insisted on turning the film over to the authorities, and then the media frenzy that ensued. Beyond that, what happened when LIFE magazine acquired it, the years following and the responsibility that came along with the film, the engrained memory that he could never forget and that was rarely spoken about within his family. Fast forward to the Warren Report and subsequent legal and moral battles.Ms. Zapruder speaks of how “[m]ost would agree that the film broke a social and cultural barrier not only by its violence but also because it witnessed the instant shattering of the physical person of the president, the institution of the presidency, and the image of perfection and power that the Kennedys projected. This was, of course, a modern problem, linked to technological progress and the ability to capture and share information that was previously either fleeting or socially unacceptable.”What Ms. Zapruder does so impeccably well is to examine the film for its place in history and at the same time show how it affected her family, something that the media and the general public could not seem to understand. Or, rather, they jumped to their own conclusions. After her grandfather passed away, her father, Henry, assumed the role as the caretaker of this important roll of film, and with admiration and respect for his father’s wishes, continued to carry on as he would have wanted it to be protected – not exploited for commercial use, not to harm the Kennedy family in any way, and not for financial gain. It was an awesome task. One that he took seriously and one that no doubt was not easy. Time and time again, the Zapruder family’s good name was under attack simply because a man, who loved to take motion pictures of his family, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and captured a 26-second film of a horrifying murder. He had to not only bear witness to that, live with that, but was made to feel like he was somehow an indecent person for having the film.Abraham Zapruder, an immigrant, a successful businessman, a man who cared deeply about his family, who raised intelligent children who went on to raise intellectually curious families of their own, is someone to be revered. This is a story about someone we should be proud of. An honorable person who was proud of his adopted country. I hope that if you are at all interested in this film, this book will provide the story of the man behind the film. This book succinctly captures a significant historical event and a family history of Mr. Abraham Zapruder and his son Mr. Henry Zapruder for the weight that they both carried and their loyal friends who stood by them along the way. I think that Ms. Alexandra Zapruder did a fine job reporting, researching her family’s history, and sharing more insight into how this short film, which has been called the greatest film recorded of American history, went from Dallas to Washington, DC, and changed the way we view the world. I am sure that her grandfather and father would be proud of her and of this book.Ms. Zapruder cites an article written by arts critic Richard B. Woodward for the New York Times in 2003 as “surely among the most intelligent and thoughtful ones about the film ever published. Perhaps the vantage point of four decades partly accounts for it, but he was able to capture many of the film’s firsts, including its status for its generation, the way its images have become ‘fused’ with assassinations itself, LIFE’s purchase of it as an early example of ‘checkbook journalism,’ the film’s challenge to the idea of the camera as witness, and how it dovetailed with the ‘crumbing of censorship rules’ that had kept violence at the margins of society. ‘Above all,’ he wrote, ‘the Zapruder film is a home movie, its images suffused with nostalgia for an unredeemable past.’”

Reviewer: Paul Arthur
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Good, interesting, in some parts profound
Review: When I started reading this book, I felt it was verbose and self important.Then it got really good and very interesting and in some parts profound.When Abe Zapruder went out to film what he saw, he wasn't a gawker, an opportunist or a merceneary. He had filmed all the time for many years, private home movies. You will read in this book that his family came from poverty and rags and eventually built a respectable life on hard work. He didn't have even a high school diploma but his son went on to Harvard law, and his son's daughter graduated from Smith and wrote this book.In this respect, he was all of us, the American everyman. Somebody in your American family lineage was the striver Abe Zapruder so that you could be today the successful generation buying books on Amazon. Someone in your family lineage had to struggle with moral conflicts that later generations had the luxury of piously avoiding.It is clear he didn't seek fame and as the book shows, it was fortune that sought him, not the other way around. Ms. Zapruder can be forgiven for moments when she defends her family, especially because she is in the right about controversies I never knew about until she described what her family went through.After I got through the Introduction (which is the closest we come to understanding and knowing Ms. Zapruder's motivation) the book is an objective and fairminded exploration of her grandfather's life and I think she brings to it dispassion, sincerity, and brilliant insight.For example,she reveals candid details about her family, including painful bouts of suspected mental illness involving her great grandfather, and she shares picareque detail of her grandfather returning dresses to Neiman Marcus after he had bootlegged the pattern for the knock off copies he manufactured in his shop. When it came to the sale of the film (I had not even thought or known about that) she explains how being a Jew "made him especially self-conscious about the financial aspect of the film's sale."I love how she describes the prurience and manipulation of the television media, showing that it started long before today's garbage on CNN. Information about Dan Rather, who I thought was sometimes sketchy, comes to light that makes me see that he was a sleezeball even before his attention seeking "Kenneth" episode and that thing about Bush that finally brought him down.This is an important insider memoir by a credible source that makes for good reading, all the negative comments about this book are also interesting revealing as they do the frenzy of conspiracy and hidden motives that surrounds anything to do with what happened in Dallas in 1963.On one level, this is an insider's look with fresh details about "the Zapruder film." On another level, it's the story of a humble man whose fame was unexpected and uninvited, and who we didn't really know until now.

Reviewer: Glenn Koch
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: I'm Not Sure How I Feel...
Review: I'm really drawn on how I felt about this book. On one hand, it was absolutely fascinating reading and understanding the the backstory to this whole snippet of history along with the minute by minute chronology of how it actually became THE Zapruder film. I couldn't put the book down during the first half of it. I really enjoyed Ms. Zapruder's writing style and the way in which she told the story. And I honestly felt the anguish that Abraham Zapruder must have felt. She brought this man, her Grandfather, to life for me in a way that he never has been portrayed before. He became more than a footnote. The problem that I had with the book was that the second half just went on and on and on. I actually enjoyed her examination of the film as it morphed from merely a visual record of an event into a cultural icon, for lack of a better description. But the travails of the family and their efforts to protect everyone from the film itself, while profiting from it from the word go, just do not jibe with the sense of anguish she portrays the family as having over their role as stewards of this film. If I had been so anguished I think I would have been happy to let it go and be done with it. I think the hardest part to swallow for me was the line that "We as a family can't just afford to make a donation to the government like this." I know it's a sensitive subject, but the film fell in their laps, more or less. And they made money from it... for years... which I don't begrudge them, right up until the point that the government took it, but please, really? All I kept asking myself was shouldn't it have been taken in as evidence right off the bat and then remained there as a part of the permanent record of a heinous crime?

Reviewer: Angus/malcolmnews.
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Quite an eye opener with lots of detail.

Reviewer: CLEO
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Really good back story to an historic event. Really feel for Abraham Zapruder his family and their unwanted launch into the public eye.

Reviewer: htk
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Life誌の写真はあまりにも有名だが、それを誰が撮影したのかは全く考えたことがなく、取材したカメラマンでもいたのだろうと思っていた。ケネディを深く尊敬し、ダラス訪問の記念にとユダヤ系移民のアブラハム・ザップルーダが撮影した家庭用8ミリ映画は歴史的悲劇の記録となってしまった。彼は直ちにコピーを連邦政府に資料として提出し、原版を信頼できると考えたLife誌に売却した。このフィルムをめぐる詳しいいきさつを孫にあたる著者が家族の立場からまとめた力作である。ケネディーの死をめぐっては未だに様々な説が出されている。しかし、祖父や家族を擁護したい自分の気持ちを認識しながら、冷静に話を進める著者の態度は非常に好感が持て、その結論は信頼できると感じさせられた。ザップルーダがユダヤ人であり、彼の意志を受け継いだ長男のヘンリーが弁護士であったことは、家族がこのフィルムで大儲けをしており、そのために策を弄しているとの世間やマスコミの反応に大きな影響があったのではと考える。実際は労多くしてであったらしいが、もう少し詳しくフィルムによる収入の情報があれば読者を完全に納得させられたと思う。ただ、きっとその情報が取得できないのだろうと推測する。

Reviewer: David Heath
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The book starts off being a little bit disjointed in the narrative but then quickly becomes compelling reading that you can hardly put down. It is a fascinating perspective particularly in the way that it traces the emotional impact on the family and how it drove them to make decisions about how to handle the film.

Reviewer: LindaF
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: THE STORYTHAT WE HAVE WAITED 53 YEARS TO HEAR.A WELL WRITTEN BOOK WRITTEN BY A RELIABLE SOURCE.SO MUCH WONDERFUL DETAIL .AN UNTOLD STORY .DONT MISS THIS BOOK!1