Word: holmans
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...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 in the early 19th century, a time before Ambien and JetBlue when the world was a dangerous, miserably uncomfortable place to travel. He circled the earth, traversed Siberia, roamed the Australian outback and the Brazilian rain forest, climbed Vesuvius during an eruption, hunted elephants in Ceylon and slave ships in the Atlantic and wrote best-selling books about it all. He did all this despite a grave handicap: he was blind...
...promising naval officer, Holman lost his sight at age 25 after a mysterious illness. That was, to say the least, a calamity. Braille had not been invented yet. The blind were institutionalized and infantilized, expected to lead celibate lives mooching or begging or doing menial work. None of which appealed to our hero. Seeking a cure (not only for his blindness but also for agonizing rheumatism), he set off alone for southern France...
...those radio talks) and The Screwtape Letters (a set of funny-creepy faux missives from a senior devil to his nephew), sold 843,000 copies, twice as many as in 2001. Multiple books about Lewis debut annually; this year's crop features Jacobs' biography and Jack's Life (Broadman & Holman) by Lewis' stepson Douglas Gresham. In 1947, a TIME cover story hailed Lewis as "one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world." Now, 58 years later (and 42 after his death, in 1963), he could arguably be called the hottest theologian...
...disarray, many families couldn't contact one other. "Our minds were going around and around like spin dryers," says Cummins resident Wendy Treloar, whose three farmer sons escaped the fire. "We just didn't know where everyone was." Beaten back by flames from one neighbor's house, Leith Holman and a friend raced to save another home. In 30 years on the peninsula, Holman has seen many fires, but none like this, he says: "It went through the scrub like a fireball, lighting up hundreds of yards in front of the main fire, just roaring with this tremendous wind...