Synopses & Reviews
Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveler with an appreciation for the odd and unusual: he will go anywhere, try anything. Through it all he manages to capture the most revealing conversations and the most transporting moments all of which he relates in these wonderful essays, taking us from the Maldives to San Francisco, from Cannes to Borneo and far beyond.
Hansen writes about the mind-altering experience of drinking kava in Vanuatu, 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 Tracey on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia, and he befriends an elderly Russian woman who used to 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 who takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions.
Each essay is a passionate experience refracted through the eyes and voice of a singularly evocative and original writer.
Review
"This extraordinary collection of short essays may leave readers disoriented as it leaps from the French Riviera to the South Pacific, India, Manhattan, California, Borneo, and back to California. But the characters Hansen meets along the way anchor themselves indelibly in the reader's imagination." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"These skillfully crafted pieces are void of the usual commercial travel flackery; Hansen conjures romantic adventure not by proclaiming it but letting it creep up and tingle on the back of your neck....The rare traveler who senses the reason why we travel in the first place." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Readers will finish this book before they know it and will find themselves wishing for more of Hansen's world, full of hidden treasures revealed through vivid prose. Highly recommended." Library Journal