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Overview
Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveler with a keenly perceptive eye and an appreciation for the odd and unusual. He will go anywhere and try anything. Through it all he manages to capture the most revealing conversations and the most transporting moments in his travels, from the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Borneo and far beyond.Hansen writes about the mind-altering experience of drinking kava in Vanuatu and about heartrending moments working at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. He joins a grieving husband searching for his dead wife's wedding ring at a crash site in the Borneo rain forest. He recounts his miraculous survival of Cyclone Tracy on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia, and he befriends an elderly Russian woman who would prepare catered dinners for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky in her tiny Manhattan kitchen while drug dealers were shot to death in the downstairs lobby. He spends time with an ornithologist who studies endangered ants and the sex lives of banana slugs—and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions.
Each essay is a passionate experience of life refracted through the eyes and voice of a singularly evocative and original writer.
Synopsis
Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveler with a keenly perceptive eye and an appreciation for the odd and unusual. He will go anywhere and try anything. Through it all he manages to capture the most revealing conversations and the most transporting moments in his travels, from the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Borneo and far beyond.
Hansen writes about the mind-altering experience of drinking kava in Vanuatu and about heartrending moments working at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying Destitute in Calcutta. He joins a grieving husband searching for his dead wife's wedding ring at a crash site in the Borneo rain forest. He recounts his miraculous survival of Cyclone Tracy on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia, and he befriends an elderly Russian woman who would prepare catered dinners for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky in her tiny Manhattan kitchen while drug dealers were shot to death in the downstairs lobby. He spends time with an ornithologist who studies endangered ants and the sex lives of banana slugs—and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions.
Each essay is a passionate experience of life refracted through the eyes and voice of a singularly evocative and original writer.
The New York Times - Pamela Paul
Unlike many world-wearied writers, Hansen avoids studied cynicism and forced sentimentality. In this collection, he focuses not only on particular places but on the people he meets while traveling to those places, be they drunken roughnecks in New Guinea, patients of Mother Teresa in Calcutta or Russian expatriate chefs in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York.
Editorials
Juliet Wittman
Eric Hansen has a lively curiosity, a good eye for detail and a swift, engaging prose style. When he travels, he doesn't merely observe but plunges fearlessly into the unknown. These attributes, which make him an ideal guide to exotic and out-of-the-way events, cultures and places, are on display in the collection The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers.— The Washington Post
Pamela Paul
Unlike many world-wearied writers, Hansen avoids studied cynicism and forced sentimentality. In this collection, he focuses not only on particular places but on the people he meets while traveling to those places, be they drunken roughnecks in New Guinea, patients of Mother Teresa in Calcutta or Russian expatriate chefs in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York.— The New York Times