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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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