The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
Georg Forster sailed with Cook at seventeen, changed European nature writing, and died in revolutionary Paris having lost everything he had to his own politics.
Wulf recovers Georg Forster, who sailed with Cook at seventeen, wrote the voyage account that changed European nature writing, and died in revolutionary Paris having lost everything to his politics. A life that touches Tahiti, Enlightenment Germany and the Terror in a single arc.
Recommended by 2 People
Tyler Cowen
This book meets her usual high standards. In this case the traveler is George Foster, who sailed with Cook to the South Seas and had relatively sympathetic attitudes toward the indigenous peoples there.
Maria Popova
Andrea Wulf animates the life of this forgotten visionary in The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris (public library) — one of those rare books in which a single life, rendered with rigor and compassion in all its delicate particularity, becomes a lens for the best in human nature: our passion for the possible, our stubborn refusal to resign ourselves to the system, our bottomless capacity for kindness.
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