Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

In his three earlier books Eric Hansen has hoofed through the Borneo jungle with native tribesmen, traveled to Turkey to sample orchid ice cream, and been rescued from a deserted island in the Red Sea by goat smugglers.

Meeting and traveling with strangers—and writing about them with equal parts wisdom and humor—is Hansen’s specialty, and he doesn’t disappoint with this collection of 35 years’ worth of stories. Hansen tells compelling tales about sipping hallucinogenic kava with tribesmen on Vanuatu, baking piroshki with an elderly Russian woman who lives in a gang-infested New York City neighborhood, and singing karaoke with Indonesian sailors while racing across the open sea, among other adventures.

In Hansen’s prior work, he shows an admirable sensitivity to place and cultural differences. Yet two essays in Bird Man fixate on Hansen’s own sexual titillation and distract from the rest of the book. In the title essay, Hansen shares a meal with two unlikely friends: a wildlife biologist and an exotic dancer. He devotes most of the story to a Q and A with the dancer, regrettably pushing the real story—the biologist’s bizarre relationship with the dancer—into the background. Another story details Hansen’s attraction to a young woman in the Maldives, complete with a soap-operatic love scene on a deserted beach.

Despite these missteps, Hansen’s collection is well worth reading. His strongest essays explore the intersections between characters and the places they inhabit—places that may never again exist in the way Hansen saw them. The stories in this collection are snapshots in time, well worth a look.