The book is a collection of travel anecdotes by adventurer Eric Hansen.

He's an adventurer in the cultural as much as the geographic sense.

Hansen grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but bummed around on the world for decades, working on a shrimp trawler between Indonesia and Australia, trekking through remote jungles in Borneo, trying to smuggle fish between the Maldives and Sri Lanka, nearly dying of hepatitis (you get the picture).

Read more about him and some of his books.

The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer is a collection of anecdotes from various points in Hansen's travels. All of the stories feature extraordinary people and events. Almost unbelievable events, really, except Hansen's matter-of-fact narrative helps you remember this IS non-fiction. Hansen's ability to write is very good and the stories sell themselves.

The title story is about an ornithologist who befriends a group of lap dancers; he even takes some of them bird-watching and slug-hunting. It might sound far-fetched if you haven't read Richard Feynman's autobiography, which mentions the lap dancers he befriended in his life, too.