Robert Jordan. Gormenghast - Welcome. Chomsky - Google Book Search. Magazine Archive Article. It may be time to retire Caspar David Friedrich's The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog from further use on a book cover.
Lovely as it is, this painting has done enough time as shorthand for a sentiment along the lines of "Man is so small, the world about him so vast, gaze on it with me, won't you? " Then again, sometimes exactly that sentiment is called for. Such is the case with Jason Roberts' A Sense of the World (HarperCollins; 382 pages), an enthralling biography of a man you've never heard of named James Holman. Holman was a prodigiously restless world traveler... Subscribe Now.