Book Review: "Twenty-Six Seconds" - A Personal History of the Zapruder Film of JFK's Assassination

"Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film," by Alexandra Zapruder. Publisher: Twelve. 472 pages. $27.

Just when you thought there wasn't a pebble left unflipped in the half-century-long excavation of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Alexandra Zapruder's Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film lands — thwack — on your desk.

Written by the granddaughter of Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas dress manufacturer who filmed the assassination on his Bell & Howell, the book is a nearly 500-page "personal history" of this famous roll of celluloid. It also thoroughly profiles the photographer, who found himself caught in a tug of war between media, law enforcement and his own sense of dignity.

A bit of disclosure: My late father, Paul Mandel, played a part in the film's story as the LIFE magazine associate editor who wrote the text that accompanied the Zapruder stills and then, a week later, wrote a much-read magazine article about the assassination.

According to the author, her grandfather felt, at least initially, a strong reluctance to share what he'd captured with LIFE, or with any other outlet.

"Should he sell it?" she writes in one of the book's many gripping passages — imagining his dilemma. "To whom? He [Zapruder] could already imagine the images splashed all over the news, on the television. The thought was sickening. Choices upon choices, none of them good."

Zapruder did, of course, end up signing contracts that allowed millions to pore over the film's images — sickening or not. "As most people do when they are faced with complicated circumstances," writes the author, "he walked the line. He made a deal that contributed to his financial security ... but he made it with LIFE magazine because at least that way he could feel that his choice was a responsible one."

Here, and at other points in the book, you can sense more than a touch of defensiveness. An author on a family mission. I've felt the same way, I confess, when my father's LIFE article has been called into question, and when his death soon after writing it became fodder for assassination conspiracy theories.

Just as many have questioned Abraham Zapruder's motives, my journalist dad came under attack for the wording of his piece and, sometimes bizarrely, for its description of the images in the Zapruder film.

"When Mandel discovered that the [Zapruder] film was inconsistent with the lone assassin theory," claimed one website that speculates on the JFK assassination, "he either shaded the article to cover up a conspiracy or was coerced into doing so by the editor of LIFE."

In some sense, just about everyone connected with the events of Nov. 22, 1963, has been under scrutiny since that day. But, along with her understandable wish to defend, the author of Twenty-Six Seconds wanders into details that don't connect up to the historic Zapruder strip of film. She devotes pages to the lives of her grandfather's parents before they immigrated to the United States, to Abe Zapruder's experiences as a "cerebral" young man on Brooklyn's Beaver Street, and to his hobbies and daily habits in Dallas.

If he'd been the inventor of the frost-free refrigerator or the head of allied air command during a major engagement, this might be of interest to the general reader. But it's perhaps not quite as compelling in the case of a small-business owner and family man who, almost by accident, became ensnared in a tragedy of national importance.

Personal histories — and memories — are like that. They squeeze out emotion. And, sometimes, they make us say more than we should.

Peter Mandel is the author of the read-aloud bestseller Jackhammer Sam (Macmillan/Roaring Brook) and other books for kids, including Zoo Ah-Choooo (Holiday House) and Bun, Onion, Burger (Simon & Schuster).