“A rich new biography…George Forster — the assistant naturalist who circumnavigated the globe with Captain Cook at just 17 — emerges not as a mere chronicler of discovery but as the primary intellectual ancestor of our contemporary ecological and humanitarian conscience…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. In rescuing Forster from the margins of history, Wulf offers us a thinker who understood, long before any of us could, that we are, despite appearances, part of “a system of divine concordance” – Boston Globe