Selected Product:
| The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers
Paperback
Author: Eric Hansen
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2005-10-18
ISBN-10: 0679771824
ISBN-13: 9780679771821
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Eric Hansen survives a cyclone on a boat off the Australian coast, cradles a dying man in Calcutta, and drinks mind-altering kava in Vanuatu. He helps a widower search for his wife's wedding ring amid plane-crash wreckage in Borneo and accompanies topless dancers on a bird-watching expedition in California. From the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Washington Heights, Eric Hansen has a way of getting himself into the most sacred ceremonies and the most candid conversations.
Barn Dance at Sea
| Customer Rating: | | This is the first book by Hansen I've read, and I enjoyed it. It is a very funny and quick read. There are not many travel writers who describe events like "It was like an all-male barn dance at sea." Or describe a man spitting his flaming dentures off a pier on Thursday Island. |
Also interesting for birders
| Customer Rating:  | This is what I wrote to a USA forum of birders (birdwatchers):
Eric Hansen, well known from his impressive travel stories located in Yemen and Borneo, has published a collection of short stories titled the Bird Man and the Lap Dancer - Close Encounters with Strangers. The main story is about a real wildlife biologist in California and the interest a few female 'special club' dancers developed for going out with him to go birdwatching. It's not hard to believe how weird this story is, but possibly in a different way from what you think. Even though birding practically disappears from halfway this 45 pages long story, it's interesting enough from the birding perspective alone. There is even some serious talk about birding, like the standardising of bird census techniques in the USA. Good to know that these subjects have made it to the world literature!
The other eight stories are not about birding but often show Hansen's great gift in describing outdoor atmosphere.
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All of My Stories Are True
| Customer Rating: | My Aunt Dagmar once told me - `All of my stories are true and some of them actually happened.' I strongly believe that is a sentiment shared by Eric Hansen.
"The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer" is an excellent read. Hansen is a first-rate writer and has no problem holding the reader's interest from one page to the next and from story to story. I was somewhat surprised to find that the first story was a character study about a relationship between two women rather than a travel story per se. However, as I read on, Hansen made me realize that travel is not just about place, but also about the people the traveler will come across in his or her journeys and I grew to appreciate the subtitle - "Close Encounters with Strangers."
I am not at all disappointed in the tales the author has to relate. But, deep down I feel that is mostly what they are - tales. This is especially true of the title story. Perhaps I come to this conclusion because in this story Hansen at times seems to lose his narrative thread and delve a little too deeply and a little too long into the psyche of the characters rather than the encounter. This story, to me, feels like a fantasy and firmly embeds this book in to the growing genre of "creative nonfiction."
While I would not place this book in the Travel section, I do highly recommend it to any one who is interested in reading about colorful people in exotic settings.
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Utterly amazing!
| Customer Rating: | Highest recommendation! How much living can one man fit into his years? I'd guess Eric Hansen can answer that as well as any person alive today. Some reviewers have praised the chapter "Life Lessons from Dying Strangers" as the best of the book. While I thoroughly loved it, "Cooking with Madame Zoya" brought a lump to my throat as I read about this spunky, independent woman making a life in a neighborhood most men would never consider entering--and receiving help from the most unexpected of sources! What a story!
"Three Nights on the Mountain" will give you chills. "The Ghost Wind" will renew your faith in native intelligence and perception. And "The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer" will leave you shaking your head in wonder at the amazing variety of people in the world.
Read this book! |
Ambushed with the T.I. handshake
| Customer Rating: | "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". |
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