Step into the life and times of George Forster, the eighteenth-century naturalist who sailed the world and made waves with his revolutionary ideas about humanity and freedom.
George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of ... Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler, a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve ... It is invigorating, especially now, to read him observing, thinking and enthusing on the page.
In our own fractured age, George Forster’s recovered legacy is a vital reminder of what we stand to lose in our artificial partitioning of the world. What a contemporary described as 'cosmopolitanism personified,' he felt no allegiance to a single nation but to humanity itself. The Traveler is an invitation to step out of our studies and experience the world — with its attendant risks and rewards.
The richness of Wulf’s research – drawn from Forster’s personal correspondence, diaries and essays, as well as those of his contemporaries – injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs.
