Customer Reviews

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers

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Years ago I enjoyed Hansen's book Motoring With Mohammad, and so when I saw this compellingly titled new collection of nine essays I immediately picked it up. Three of these are essentially profiles of interesting people Hansen has come across in his years of globe trotting, and the other six could be grouped under the heading of travel writing, although they tend to transcend the genre. All of the essays are immensely readable and engrossing, as Hansen is one of those rare travel writers who writes beautifully and insightfully about places, people, and experience.

The first profile, "Arlette and Madame Perruche", is also the shortest piece in the book. It's an 8-page sketch of the friendship between an elderly Russian ballerina and a homeless woman in the south of France. The brief piece gives a deep sense of the power of generosity and friendship. Another elderly Russian woman is the subject of the second profile, "Cooking With Madame Zoya." Here, the subject lives in New York and is renown for her authentic Russian cuisine, catering for massive parties from the tiny kitchen of her Washington Heights tenement. The mini-biography over twenty pages is compelling in its own right, but what it really does is make one reflect upon how every old person around us has rich stories to tell if we are willing to listen. The final profile gives the collection its provocative title, and is about a wildlife biologist in northern California and his unlikely friendship with a group of strippers. Like the first profile, it's about a very unlikely friendship, and Hansen spends 35 pages trying to get at what makes it work.

The six travel pieces span approximately thirty years of Hansen's life and are utterly unique and compelling reading. In "Life at the Grand Hotel", Hansen is working on a shrimp trawler off the Australian coast in 1974. In only a few pages he very effectively sketches what life on a shrimper is like, and then Cyclone Tracy hits. This was a horrific storm in which several other trawlers sank, some 16 people died at sea, and Hansen's home port of Darwin was leveled. Barely making it through the storm, the boat lays up at Thursday Island and a shaken Hansen is drawn to the nexus of social life there, the Grand Hotel. This becomes his home for the next several months, and his tales of the wild people and antics there are quite funny. This is the kind of story that will make the reader want to run away from home and embark on strange adventures. It's also a postcard from the past, as globalization has clearly reached in and tamed the island since then.

"Listening to Kava" is a 15-page piece that would be very much at home in one of the more interesting travel magazines. In it, Hansen journeys to Vanuatu to learn about the rites that revolve around the kava root, which is central to native culture there. It's no-holds-barred experiential journalism as he gets whammied by the powerful hallucinogenic effect and lives to write about it. "Life Lessons From Dying Strangers" is an oddly funny and spiritual piece from 1977. Hansen was in Calcutta and wanted to send several steamer trunks of various Asian artifacts he'd collected back home in San Francisco. Alas, the Indian bureaucracy was more than his match, and a task that should have taken a week turned into months of frustration. As part of alleviating that frustration, he offhandedly wandered into Mother Teresa's hospice for the dying poor, and found spiritual calm through volunteering. Those with a spiritual bent will probably find this the most compelling of the essays.

"Night Fishing With Nahimah" also dates from 1977, however here Hansen is in the Maldives, embarking on a rather dubious scheme to smuggle dried fish to Sri Lanka. The appetite for this delicacy is such that it's apparently a lucrative endeavor, and his machinations require him to journey to outlying islands to purchase his stock directly from fishermen. Fascinating adventures ensue, including near death from hepatitis, a surprising lesson in local sexual customs, a stay in a remote village, and most importantly a one night affair with a beautiful native woman. Again, this is the type of essay that makes one want to run off and try something crazy.

"Three Nights on the Mountain" recounts how Hansen was hired in 1991 to travel to Borneo to help a Texan search for his wife's engagement ring, lost when she died in a plane crash on a remote part of the island. The man came across Hansen's book "Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo" and wouldn't take no for an answer. The trip is brief, but very eerie and poignant. Finally, "The Ghost Wind" is about a tall-ship race from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2000. Hansen talks his way onto a creaky rustbucket Indonesian naval training ship which against all odds, mounts a serious challenge to the ultramodern Japanese entry. This last essay ends things on an emphatic upbeat note.

Hansen is a brilliantly talented writer, able to bring the reader not only into his physical world, but into his emotional world. It's rare that travel narratives are able to accomplish this without feeling false or descending into mawkish sentimentality, but Hansen pulls it off. But most importantly, he has incredibly interesting stories to tell -- this is a collection whose stories will stay with the reader for quite a long time.

As a hardcore birder and a former lap dancer, there was no way I could resist this book. I approached the title essay with some trepidation; as an ex-stripper who chafes at the typical stereotypes, I tend to take a defensive stance when reading or viewing an outsider's depiction of 'exotic' dancers. In this case, I needn't have worried. Hansen's encounter with "Layla" reminded me of so many of the intelligent and charismatic women I have met in stripclubs; it was simply one of the best depictions of this type of dancer that I have ever encountered anywhere. (Sure, there are women who conform to the negative stereotypes as well...and Layla perhaps glosses over some of the negative aspects of the industry during her conversation with the author...but still. I stayed in the industry as long as I did partly because I met so many fascinating, wise & funny women in the clubs. I thank Mr. Hansen for giving us a glimpse of this reality.) His attempts to illuminate the subculture of the friendly neighborhood stripclub also mostly hit the mark. (However, he does get a few bird-related details wrong--things only a total birdgeek would notice.)

The other stories in this book are wonderful, too. I especially loved "Cooking with Madame Zoya" and "Life at the Grand Hotel." He is a fine writer--his prose is straightforward and mostly unembellished, but deeply affecting in its simplicity. Despite Mr. Hansen's incredible adventures, there is no bluster here. The writing is not "pretty" or showoff-y, but gentle, quiet, and surprisingly winsome.

I highly recommend this eminently readable volume. Upon completion, you will want to invite the author to dinner (or take him out birding, or buy him a lapdance...or all three. Anyway, I did. :))

Enjoy!

This book will introduce you to new places (Maldives, Thursday Island, and Vanuatu) and make you see familiar places in a new light (New York and California). Hansen is a wonderful narrator. He has a simple respect for everyone he meets and this allows him to penetrate deeper into their world. He has had an adventure-filled life and I'm thankful that he has shared more of his experiences here. If this is your first introduction to Hansen check out Motoring with Muhammad. It will help you understand the Arab world and give you some fine insights into the strange and often neglected country of Yemen. You won't be disappointed.

I first got my hands on this collection in bound-galley form while working in the marketing office of a bookstore. I love short stories and travel memoirs, and this was a compelling collection of both.

I read most of the book aloud, over the phone from Vermont to Brooklyn, during several late night conversations with my best friend. Nearly two years later, tonight, he recalled the book and asked for the title. I had given the galley away while preparing to move to a new house, and thus embarked on a mad Google quest using only the keywords "bird" "short stories" "2004." Fortunately, luck was on my side, and I was able to scout out the title and author without much fuss.

All this is to say that my friend's fond memory makes us both yearn to read the stories again. Hansen tells of his varied adventures with a deft, humorous, and engaging voice, and once I get my hands on the collection this time, I won't give it away.

Eric Hansen's travel essays (written over twenty-plus years) are upbeat, serious, downright funny and just plain strange at times. Hansen says, "The best way to penetrate a culture and mingle with the people was by getting involved with the local economy." He is the handy man for a rowdy hotel on an island off the coast of Australia; a volunteer at Mother Theresa's Home for Dying Destitute in Calcutta, India and a fish smuggler at the Republic of Maldives.

"The Bird Man And The Lap Dancer" not only takes you visually to places as diverse as Vanuatu and the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, but it also exposes readers to the area's daily life by meticulously dissecting the culture.

The book works due to Hansen's disarming personality and his insatiable curiosity. The author's saintly patience is tested often with comedic effect; the most hilarious moments take place in India. Hansen is put through the ringer of the country's bureaucracy as he tries to ship crates back to the States. The scenes are so ridiculously over-the-top with red tape procedures that even Franz Kafka's Mr. K ("The Castle") would have to pause and laugh.

In short, the concise essays pack in history, humor, memoir, and cultural observations without straining the reader, a pure delight page after page.

Bohdan Kot

"Foreplay lasts for hours as they circle each other in a clockwise direction - licking, nibbling, and rasping at each other's genital region. They taste and eat each other's slime; maybe to get turned on, or as some sort of exchange of genetic information. When sufficiently aroused, they enter each other and have continuous sex for up to thirty-six hours." - from THE BIRD MAN AND THE LAP DANCER

Before you click away from this review in disgust thinking the book is about bizarre sex rituals practiced by some weird cult, probably in California, or, rather, become glued to the text out of prurient interest, just realize that the quote above comes from wildlife biologist Oliver Sparrow about the mating ritual of banana slugs, genus Ariolimax. No surprise, the subspecies A. californicus brachyphallus does inhabit the Golden State.

Sparrow is one of the characters author Eric Hansen meets in this unusual compilation of travel essays. Unusual because, while the reader is taken to such exotic locales as Calcutta, the Borneo rainforest, Thursday Island off Australia's northern coast, the Maldives, and the sinister Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, the volume's focus is indicated by its subtitle, "Close Encounters with Strangers". It's a book more about people than places.

The very best chapter, the one which would earn the whole a five star award all on its own because of the lesson on perspective it teaches, is "Life Lessons from Dying Strangers". Here, Hansen recounts the months he spent cooling his heels in Calcutta while trying to arrange with the labyrinthine Indian bureaucracy the shipment home of two enormous steamer trunks filled with souvenirs from his Asian travels. Almost beside himself with frustration, Eric only finds inner peace through volunteering at Mother Teresa's hospice for the dying destitute.

And then there's the chapter about the biologist, Sparrow, who takes lap dancers from the gentlemen's club he frequents on nature hikes. Or the one about the grief-stricken widower who searches for his wife's wedding ring amidst the jungle-strewn wreckage of the executive jet in which she died.

I enjoyed THE BIRD MAN AND THE LAP DANCER more than I thought I would. More than most, it has "the human touch". And you, too, can learn what it means to be on the receiving end of a "T.I. handshake".

Eric Hansen is a cut above the average travel essayist. Dubbed creative non-fiction, his stories are poignant, well-crafted and heart felt. His well-informed descriptive writing is crisp and engaging. His renderings of the people he has met over three decades of globe trotting are tender, but never saccharine. His professionalism shines through in this well-crafted collection of travel tales. Not the ordinary tourist he plunges headlong into adventures that are daunting to even the most adventurous. A few of these stories could be classified as remembrances rather than travel essays, but I loved all of them. The Bird Man who befriends a topless dancer is more an observation about strange bedfellows than it is a travel tale, but who cares. You will enjoy this superb collection of stories no matter what label you chose to give it.
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I ordered this book based on all the enthusiastic reviews I read from other everyday readers like me and I must say I was very disappointed by the writing style, especially since he's quite an established writer. Though the stories themselves are interesting enough, he writes as if this is a blog, with unfinished thoughts, meandering musings and distracting asides. It just made me wonder if an editor was ever involved in the process of getting this book published?!

This is wonderful book--it is beautifully written, varied in its topics, and, most important of all, intensely human. My favorite chapter is the last, when the author accompanies the karaoke-crazed crew of an Indonesian tall ship in a race off the west coast of the USA. Eric Hansen quite obviously likes and respects the people he comes into contact with, and there is too little of that in today's world. Don't miss this one!

There are some great short stories in this book - Life at the Grand Hotel, which takes place on remote islands of North Australia - was my favorite. The stories do not rely on one another, which was convenient because a couple of them were pretty bland - maybe it was just in comparison to the others that were so great. This is the first book of Eric Hansen's that I have read and while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others, I do plan to read some of his other books - Motoring with Mohammed and Stranger in the Forest. This guy lived a wild life and he seems to do a very adept job of describing his experiences without laboring too much on the non-essential details.