HANSEN, Eric K. 1947(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1947.

ADDRESSES: Home—San Francisco, CA. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Pantheon Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019. E-mail—ekhansen@ix.netcom.com.

CAREER: Writer. Grand Hotel, Thursday Island, maintenance worker, 1975. Has worked at a variety of odd jobs, including prawn fisherman and skipjack tuna smuggler.

WRITINGS:

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy (nonfiction), Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor to New York Times, National Geographic, Travel and Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Outside magazine.

TRAVELOGUES

Stranger in the Forest: On Foot across Borneo, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1988.

Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1991.

The Traveler: An American Odyssey in the Himalayas, photographs by Hugh Swift, Sierra Club Books (San Francisco, CA), 1993.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Eric K. Hansen has made a living out of having wild adventures in exotic locales, meeting interesting people, and then writing about them. In the 1970s he and four of his friends wrecked their sailboat and wound up stranded on an uninhabited island twenty miles from Yemen, at the southern end of the Arabian peninsula. Help came eventually, and the story of the wreck, as well as Hansen's journey back to Yemen ten years after the fact to retrieve the journals he buried on the island, provided him with material for the book Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea. The story itself is an adventure, but "along the way," R.Z. Sheppard noted in Time, "Hansen delivers a lush portrait of a society that has managed to survive even though there seems to be a Kalashnikov [rifle] for every copy of the Koran."

Hansen's next book, The Traveler: An American Odyssey in the Himalayas, is partially an encomium to Hansen's late friend and fellow traveler and travel-writer, Hugh Swift, and partially a reminiscence of Hansen's own experiences traveling in the mountains of Asia. The book succeeds on both levels, according to a Publishers Weekly contributor, who declared that "Hansen's text is at once a moving tribute to his friend and his own glorious discourse on travel and travelers."

Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy records Hansen's venture into the wild world of orchid enthusiasts. This world includes professional botanists, hobbyists, nursery owners, and orchid smugglers. The last group is an important factor in the orchid business, as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) places strict rules on the cultivation of orchids that turn many of those who love the flowers into criminals. For the most part, Hansen's stories about these men and women "are fundamentally vehicles for illustrating his serious and provocative arguments against CITES," Brian Lym noted in Library Journal. However, despite the serious purpose of the book, reading it is "fully enjoyable," concluded a Publishers Weekly contributor.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers is a collection of thirty years' worth of Hansen's stories, most focusing on the unique individuals he has met around the world over the years. He tells how he decided to stay on Thursday Island, off Australia, after spending one enjoyable night of leave when the prawn-trawler he was working on at the time docked there. "It is difficult to pinpoint the highlight of that evening," Hansen wrote, "but I would guess it was probably the sight of a man spitting his flaming dentures off the end of the wharf, as he tried to teach me how to blow fireballs with a mouthful of kerosene and a burning newspaper." Hansen quit his job on the trawler and reveled in this laid-back, party-hearty lifestyle while working as the maintenance man for the Grand Hotel, whose bar was a favorite party destination. The drunken festivities there often resulted in broken doors, furniture, and windows, and repairing the damage was Hansen's primary duty.

Hansen's other South Pacific adventures included smuggling skipjack tuna from the Maldives into Sri Lanka and trying kava, an hallucinogenic drug, on Vanuatu. The kava is prepared by children who chew the leaves up and spit them out onto other leaves, off of which they are eaten. Hansen also tells of his friendship with Madame Zoya, a Russian émigré living in a bad part of New York City under the protection of a drug lord. She catered lavish parties for everyone from Prince Charles to the New York City Ballet out of her tiny apartment, seemingly oblivious to the crime all around her. The title story is about a birdwatcher from California who enjoys befriending strippers and taking them out on birding expeditions with him. The women prove to be surprisingly good conversationalists; on the day Hansen tagged along, the subject of conversation was Aristotelian philosophy and its influence on St. Thomas Aquinas.

"In each of these encounters with strangers," Eric Fidler wrote in the Miami Herald, "Hansen's curiosity, ability to meet people on their own terms and willingness to try just about anything make the experience fascinating." "Deft storytelling, flavorful prose, a canny gift for bringing characters alive on the page, a receptivity to all that is strange and unruly in our world—these traits make Hansen an extraordinarily pleasurable and eye-opening author to read," Michael Upchurch declared in his Seattle Times review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hansen, Eric K., The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2004.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 2004, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer: Close Encounters with Strangers, p. 200.

Boston Globe, November 3, 2004, Kathy Shorr, "Author Enjoys Time Traveling with 'Strangers'—And So Will Readers."

Entertainment Weekly, October 22, 2004, Daniel Fierman, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer, p. 102.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2004, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer, p. 786.

Library Bookwatch, March, 2005, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer.

Library Journal, February 15, 2000, Brian Lym, review of Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy, p. 188; September 1, 2004, Joseph L. Carlson, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer, p. 175.

Miami Herald, October 24, 2004, Eric Fidler, "His Wanderlust Is Enlightening."

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 1993, review of The Traveler: An American Odyssey in the Himalayas, p. 51; January 31, 2000, review of Orchid Fever, p. 94; August 23, 2004, review of The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer, p. 47.

San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 2004, Anneli Rufus, "Vibrant Characters Carry Globe-hopping Adventure Tales."

San Jose Mercury News, October 24, 2004, Jill Wolfson, "The Heart and Soul of a Place."

Seattle Times, November 5, 2004, Michael Upchurch, "Travel Writer at His Best in Bird Man."

Time, February 25, 1991, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea, p. 73.