Buy new:
$24.50$24.50
FREE delivery:
Feb 13 - 16
Ships from: Gail The Book Seller Sold by: Gail The Book Seller
Buy Used: $7.25
Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
88% positive over last 12 months
Usually ships within 3 to 4 days.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images Hardcover – November 22, 2003
Enhance your purchase
Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Donna Reed, Playboy magazine, Jack Ruby, the Rosenbergs, and many more personalities, little-known events, and behind-the-scenes stories of the era enliven Lubin's account as he unlocks the meaning of these photographs of the Kennedys. Elegantly conceived, witty, and intellectually daring, Shooting Kennedy becomes a stylish meditation on the changing meanings of visual phenomena and the ways they affect our thinking about the past, the present, and the process of history.
- Print length356 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of California Press
- Publication dateNovember 22, 2003
- Dimensions7 x 1.2 x 9 inches
- ISBN-109780520229853
- ISBN-13978-0520229853
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
From the Inside Flap
A path-breaking reflection on the Kennedy period in America, with its flash, its verve, its astonishing acceleration of image-flicker, and its singular and unforgettable heartbreak. David Lubin captures this complex not by chronologically mapping its mileposts, but by looking around-with focused attention, extraordinary range, and analytical insight--at what occupied Americans' imaginations and attention during the Kennedy years.--Richard Terdiman, author of Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis
One of the most readable and compelling books ever written on visual aspects of twentieth-century American culture. David Lubin engages some of the best-known images from the most image-saturated century in far-reaching dialogues with one another and with an imaginative array of artifacts drawn from photojournalism, the visual arts, movies, television, and other media. He makes astonishing yet convincing connections among these disparate cultural phenomena that will change the way readers think about life in the highly mediated world of the post-World War II United States.--George H. Roeder, Jr., author of The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II
From the Back Cover
"A path-breaking reflection on the Kennedy period in America, with its flash, its verve, its astonishing acceleration of image-flicker, and its singular and unforgettable heartbreak. David Lubin captures this complex not by chronologically mapping its mileposts, but by looking around-with focused attention, extraordinary range, and analytical insight--at what occupied Americans' imaginations and attention during the Kennedy years."―Richard Terdiman, author of Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis
"One of the most readable and compelling books ever written on visual aspects of twentieth-century American culture. David Lubin engages some of the best-known images from the most image-saturated century in far-reaching dialogues with one another and with an imaginative array of artifacts drawn from photojournalism, the visual arts, movies, television, and other media. He makes astonishing yet convincing connections among these disparate cultural phenomena that will change the way readers think about life in the highly mediated world of the post-World War II United States."―George H. Roeder, Jr., author of The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0520229851
- Publisher : University of California Press; First edition (November 22, 2003)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 356 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780520229853
- ISBN-13 : 978-0520229853
- Item Weight : 2.4 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.2 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,729,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,205 in Photography Collections & Exhibitions (Books)
- #6,757 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #7,778 in Communication & Media Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
In SHOOTING KENNEDY, Lubin employs a process that in post-modern cultural critique has become the prevailing strategy: the Dadaist practice of placing on the dissection table the sewing machine and the umbrella and reporting on their encounter. SHOOTING KENNEDY may, thus, for some readers, seem a bizarre and desacralizing example of the kind of "relativistic" post-modern cultural criticism that upends and sabotages the "milestone event" narrations of history by treating everything as a cultural text, everything as grist for the cultural critique mill.
As an example of this technique, Lubin, late in the book, examines a LIFE magazine spread showing a liquor ad featuring a dandy tipping his hat in salute on the page facing the famous photo of John John's salute of his father's passing coffin. He then offers a disquisition on the suggested birth of the salute in the era of the knight errant, who it is believed, lifted up the visor on his helmet to show another knight his eyes to show he intended no harm. He then goes on to discuss the notion of Camelot as a metaphor for the Kennedy presidency, and then ties in JFK's boyhood reading during his sickly childhood of romantic tales of knighthood by Sir Walter Scott and others.
To the average reader of political history, this will seem an inappropriate invasion of one discipline into the precincts of another -- in this case materials of history and politics examined with theories and tools of art criticism. The similarities Lubin finds between notable paintings from the Western canon and news photos of the Kennedy's and JFK's assassination will seem superfluous, beside the point. So will the parallels he finds between the structure of the Zapruder film and the standard Hollywood movie both now and then. Average readers will be more comfortable with coincidence as the principle behind the suggestive links he finds in history and art,(e.g., Oswald jumping onto the stage in the Dallas movie theater where he sought to hide from the police, John Wilkes Booth jumping onto the stage of the Ford Theater after shooting Lincoln, the Nazi villain in Lubitsch¹s "To Be or Not to Be" being chased onto the stage before being captured and killed), and less comfortable with the idea that life and art are inseparable and dialogic. This approach may seem destabilizing and even decadent. Lubin admits as much. Indeed, he often recognizes that his approach may serve to cast dirt on the icons whose images and histories he examines. He explains that this is not his intent; one's reaction will depend entirely upon whether mentioning Camelot and the Beverly Hillbillies in the same breath seems appropriate.
The post-modern argument has come to prevail in the academy, although in fact it was never really all that radical a position to begin with: reasonable readers of history always recognized that whatever claims to the contrary, historians came to their work with agendas (even "objectivity" is an agenda). Historians, like art historians and art critics develop followings depending on both their skills as a storyteller as well as by how well they support their version of history in their selection of and retelling of facts. In both cases, what emerges always is the sensibility of the critic. There are schools of history in the same way there are schools of art and art criticism.
Still, even accepting the post-modern notions of the text, Lubin's selection of facts and materials has something of the magpie about it -- meaning that his choices, while mostly hits are occasional misses. For instance, how relevant is it that Marat's assassin was the same age as Lee Harvey Oswald? This "insight" is one of those stray facts that pose as enlightening but are not. It is the same kind of quasi-fascinating fact that conspiracy theorists yoke together in their fantastic farragoes. Incidentally, Lubin does an excellent job on the cultural output of these re-writers of the circumstances of the assassination. He takes no sides, he only examines their output in conjunction with that of other forms of reportage, history and journalism.
Altogether an illuminating, creative, and corrective work of criticism.
Top reviews from other countries
