The Way We Were: 1963, the Year Kennedy Was Shot

This is a fine old-fashioned picture story, still the stock-in-trade of top magazines in the early '60s but seldom seen today. It depicts in well-chosen words and pictures the character and feelings of America in the pivotal year of an era that saw the first contemporary stirrings of black and feminist liberation, of space exploration and our Vietnam involvement, which ended dramatically and definitively with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22. To those who experienced that day, the recollection made vivid here is searing, and the changes that came about in American society since then startling. In an excellent synthesis, PBS-TV news co-anchor MacNeil brings together period photographs, illustrations and quotes from participants to recreate a bygone America of advertisements extolling cigarettes, of submissive women and sexually circumspect movies, of a tame and ``proper'' tone in pop music and fashionable attireall with a strong, now-vanished sense of hopeful participation in the nation's, and the world's, affairs. 125,000 first printing; BOMC, QPBC and History Book Club selections. (Nov.)