Customer Reviews

A Time to Remember (Signet)

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Stanley Shapiro's book about a man who goes back in time to try to stop the Kennedy assassination is a fast read and a good one. Shapiro, whose only other novel (that I've been able to locate) is a strange and well written horror fantasy called "Simon's Soul," wrote the movie "Running Against Time" which was based on "A Time to Remember." The movie was very good... it cut out a few of the more depressing parts and changed the ending, but was otherwise faithful.

Yes, the story about Kennedy pulling us out of Vietnam and keeping bad things across the following decades from happening might not be entirely plausible, but the story doesn't suffer because of it. Check out the book "Time Out of Mind" by Peter Delacorte, which tells a time travel theory about how much better the world would have been if they went back in time and killed Reagan. Authors' political views aside, both of these time travel books were very entertaining and well written.

You know all those reviews that say "I couldn't put down this book"? I've never experienced that situation until I read this amazing, fast-paced, engaging book. I picked it up one evening and literally HAD to keep reading, finishing it as the sun was coming up. I went to work exhausted, but thrilled to have experienced A TIME TO REMEMBER. If you have a chance to open this book, make sure you have lots of time!

Stanley Shapiro's book was so captivating that I read it in two nights. A man meets an amicable Noble Prize winner, who has invented a time machine in 1985, and he convinces the scientist to send him back to 1963 to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and thus (it is averred) prevent the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the subsequent death of the man's brother.

There are lots of twists and turns, with alternative-history consequences--all of which are fascinating! What would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had not become president? Which presidents would have succeeded Kennedy, if he had not died? What if Lee Harvey Oswald had lived?

A note: Shapiro won an academy award in 1959 as a co-author of the original screeplay for the Doris Day/Rock Hudson film Pillow Talk (beating out The 400 Blows, North by Northwest, and Wild Strawberries--some of the greatest films in history)!

Stanley Shapiro's A Time To Remember is an amiable mix of old-fashioned science fiction and baby boomer nostalgia for a more innocent, pre-Viet Nam America. In 1986, a Dallas-based man, his girlfriend, and an almost campily eccentric professor experiment with travelling into the past. Our hero's goal? To go back to November 22nd, 1963, prevent Lee Harvery Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy, and save the life of his older brother who would die in a war that the book's heroes (and writer Shapiro himself) is convinced that JFK would have prevented had he lived. ... It's a neat, little plot and Shapiro tells his story with such sincerity that it hardly matters that many of the book's twists and assumptions don't hold up under closer scrutiny. (For instance, the book's central assumption that Kennedy would have truly pulled out of Viet Nam and by doing so, prevented every traumatic event of the next two decades always seems to be more a case of wish fullfilment than a truly believable possibility.) What makes the book work is Shapiro's loving recreation of a simpler, less cynical America, of the nation that basically disappeared into the upheavel of the '60s. Reading this book, it is impossible not to mourn that innocence that has been lost in the past few decades. Even if you don't agree with Shapiro's central assumption that Kennedy, if he had lived, would have preserved that innocence, it's hard not to wish he was right as you read this heartfelt, idealistic fable.