A collection that will be of most interest to the author’s family members, but will also serve as a primary source for...
Five diaries relate a family’s travel experiences in the United States and Europe by plane, train, and automobile.
During the prosperous 1920s and into the early years of the Great Depression, the Bornets family, Quakers from Philadelphia, made several trips at home and abroad. Five travel diaries by Florence Davis Bornet (née Scull); her husband, Vaughn Taylor Bornet; and their daughter, Josephine Scull Bornet, are the basis for this book, edited by the elder Bornets’ son, who was born in 1917. In the first diary, Florence describes traveling by train in 1925, when she was 41. From Philadelphia, the train traveled to Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, with stopovers at the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. Next is Vaughn Taylor’s diary of a business trip and football outing that took him from Philadelphia to Ozona, Texas, and Berkeley, California, by train in 1927. Josephine’s diary describes traveling with her mother by ocean liner the following year for a grand tour of Europe, visiting the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1930, Vaughn Taylor also visited Europe by boat, and he took his first airplane flight. The Bornets’ fortunes declined with the Depression, and the fifth diary is more like a map with notes, logging the elder Bornets’ drive through the southeast United States; the family eventually resettled in Florida. Author Bornet (The Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, 1984, etc.) is clearly proud of his family and their adventures, and his own relatives will most appreciate this book, which is amply illustrated with photos. As travel writing, though, these diaries have less to offer. The family members usually offer generic praise of the sights they see, calling them “beautiful,” “wonderful,” “gorgeous,” “charming,” “quaint,” and—too evidently—“beyond description.” Vaughn Taylor’s travels in Europe are somewhat livelier, though, and his careful documentation of costs in the final section gives an ephemeral but illuminating window into the Depression.
A collection that will be of most interest to the author’s family members, but will also serve as a primary source for travel historians.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9908075-8-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
