Author(s): Eric Hansen

Literature

Eric Hansen is an intrepid traveller with a keenly perceptive eye and an appreciation for the odd and unusual. He will go anywhere, try anything, and always manages to capture something remarkable in the doing.In this extraordinary book, Hansen writes about drinking mind-altering kava in Vanuatu, his heart-rending experience as a volunteer working amongst the poor and the dying in Mother Teresa's Calcutta sanctuary. He joins a grieving husband's search for his dead wife's wedding ring at a crash site in the Borneo rain forest, and recounts his own miraculous survival of Cyclone Tracy on a fishing boat off the north coast of Australia. He befriends an elderly Russian woman who prepared dinner for Balanchine and Stravinsky in her tiny Manhattan kitchen while drug-dealers were shot to death in the lobby below, spends time with an ornithologist studying the sex-lives of banana-slugs, and takes topless dancers on bird-watching expeditions. The best, most enduring travel writers don't invite readers to merely view vistas through other eyes, but take the trip further, deep into the psychology of place. Hansen does just that in this lyrical collection that is equal parts travelogue, memoir and anthropological treatise.