Title: Dear Mrs. Kennedy: The World Shares Its Grief, Letters November 1963
Authors: Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 12, 2010
Hardcover: 240 pages
ISBN: 978-0312386153
Genre: Biographies and Memoirs
From the Publisher:
From the bestselling author of Kennedy Weddings and Diana and Jackie comes a powerful and moving collection of the condolence letters Jacqueline Kennedy received after the assassination of John F. Kennedy
In the weeks and months following the assassination of her husband, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy received more than one million letters. The impact of President Kennedy’s death was so immense that people from every station in life wrote to her, sharing their feelings of sympathy, sorrow, and hope.
She received letters from political luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., and Charles De Gaulle. Hollywood stars like Lauren Bacall, Vivian Leigh, and Gene Kelly voiced their sympathy, as did foreign dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth II, the King and Queen of Greece, and the Prince of Monaco. Distinguished members of the arts and society—Ezra Pound, Noel Coward, Babe Paley, Langston Hughes, Oleg Cassini, Josephine Baker—offered their heartfelt condolences. And children, with the most heartbreaking sincerity, reached out to the First Lady to comfort her in her time of grief.
More than just a compendium of letters, Dear Mrs. Kennedy uses these many voices to tell the unforgettable story of those fateful four days in November, when the world was struck with shock and sadness. It vividly captures the months that followed, as a nation—and a family—attempted to rebuild.
Filled with emotion, patriotism, and insight, the letters are a poignant time capsule of one of the seminal events of the twentieth century. Dear Mrs. Kennedy offers a diverse portrait not only of the aftermath of the assassination, but of the Kennedy mystique that continues to captivate the world.
My Review:
Dear Mrs. Kennedy by Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis takes the reader back to 1964 and the world’s outpouring of love to the Kennedy family after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an emotional and poignant manner, the authors select from telegrams, and notes from over a million people from all classes and cultures from around the world that were sent to Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy in 1964. Rather than merely selecting several letters to allow the readers to get a sense of what the world felt, the authors went a step further to reconstruct those four horrific days in Jacqueline Kennedy’s life and the months following through various letters ranging from dignitaries to average citizens. Dear Mrs. Kennedy is a beautiful, historic treasure, a time capsule in book form of how the world was in the days following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination touching on poignant memories, historic moments, and a tremendous outpouring of grief, shock and support. I would recommend Dear Mrs. Kennedy to anyone who enjoys historical books.
Paul De Angelis served more than three decades in the book publishing business as Editor, Editorial Director, or Editor-in-Chief of such publishing companies as St. Martin’s Press and E.P. Dutton and Kodansha America. After becoming an independent editor in 1996 he founded Paul De Angelis Book Development, which assists authors, agents, publishers and organizations in turning ideas & manuscripts into books. Since 1997 Paul has edited, contributed to, and co-published the quarterly guide to the Rhinebeck-Red Hook-Hudson area of the mid-Hudson Valley, AboutTown. In the past few years his main writing and research interest has been American culture and politics in its intersection with the wider world.
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I received a complimentary copy of Dear Mrs. Kennedy by Jay Mulvaney and Paul De Angelis from TLC Book Tours to be a part of this tour and offer my honest review of the book. Receiving a complimentary copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned book.
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