Rating: 
Summary: Thank you, Mrs. Connally
Review: The former First Lady of Texas takes an infamous blot on our history, an event that quite literally changed the world for generations to come, and put it in completely human terms. This is what happened to her and her family. This is how she remembers it. What's more, it's how she experienced it -- from both the front seat of the Lincoln Continental and the corridors of Parkland Hospital. This makes it an invaluable historical record, and a moving account written by a woman who had been fired upon in an open car and held her bleeding husband in her arms. Perhaps it is "slight." I would not have wanted her to embellish or alter her memories of those tragic days just to accommodate readers who measure a book's worth by the number of pages. I did not consider the photographs, the reproduction of her notes nor President Kennedy's undelivered speeches "filler." They lent texture and veracity to her story. And I do not see how anyone can say there is nothing "new" here. She is the only one of those three surviving passengers who discussed what happened at this length with the public. That in and of itself is "new." I appreciate this lady's gallantry and her generosity in contributing her family's history to our country's history. And I was also moved by her son John's recollections of the funeral. It was poignant to read a man nearing 60 recalling the awe, pagentry and pain he experienced while still a teen.
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: This is a surprisingly short book, and about one-third of its content is pure filler. Its narrative ends after only 139 photo-laden pages, after which Mrs. Connally's 1963 notes are first transcribed and then displayed again as photocopies. The book closes with the printed text of two speeches John Kennedy was scheduled to have delivered on November 22.More disappointing than its brevity are the blatant factual errors that appear in the book. Mrs. Connally's ghostwriter, her editor(s), and her fact checkers have let her down. The errors range from minor (such as stating Thanksgiving 1963 occurred five days after the assassination when November 22, 1963 fell on a Friday) to the more serious. Near the end of Chapter 6, the book states "After three years in the service [Oswald] had earned a marksman's medal, but had also been court-martialed twice and, eventually, received a dishonorable discharge, signed by President Kennedy's Secretary of the Navy, John B. Connally." This sentence, embedded in a roughly chronological passage on Oswald, first strikes the reader as an interesting factoid. However, many will immediately realize the timeline is a bit suspect since Oswald defected in 1959 (as noted in the book) but Kennedy didn't take office until 1961. In fact, Oswald never received a dishonorable discharge. He received an early dependency discharge in September of 1959 and an undesirable discharge in September of 1960. Connally could not have been involved with either of these events. The only known contact Oswald ever had with Connally was in January of 1962, when after returning from overseas Oswald wrote to Connally in an attempt to have his undesirable discharge rescinded. By then, Connally had resigned to prepare for his run for governor, so Connally forwarded the letter on to appropriate naval personnel. The claim that Connally signed Oswald's dishonorable discharge papers appears again in Chapter 12. It appears that the author felt the statement was worth repeating but not worth verifying. If such a high-profile statement is so obviously incorrect and easily disproved, how can we trust anything else reported in this book?
Rating: 
Summary: FROM LOVE FIELD-FINAL HOURS W/JFK
Review: THIS IS A VERY DISAPPOINTING BOOK - IT COULD HAVE SERVED ITSELF BETTER AS A MAGAZINE ARTICLE - THERE IS TOO MUCH REHASHING OF OLD INFORMATION AND WHAT'S KNEW IS SLIGHT.
SAVE YOUR MONEY AND GET IT OUT OF YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARY.
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