A Moment with Strangers

A Moment with Strangers embraces the brief encounter, sometimes with other people, sometimes with landscape, weather, or history. W. Scott Olsen's collection of travel essays and photos represents moments in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, New Zealand, France, and more.
W. Scott Olsen is infuriatingly gifted. He traverses the world with the 0sensibility that we all wish we had: patient, alert, funny, and awed by genuine splendor, vast and small. His pictures and their stories are poetry without pretense. This is a book to savor. Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, winner of the National Book Award
Olsen is not a great photographer, but A Moment with Strangers is filled with wonderful pictures, illuminated by the writer s infectious curiosity. He ferrets out the secrets of cameras and clouds, gets cursed by the con artists of Paris, finds mortality in the Gallery of Clocks and Watches in the British Museum, and takes us to Paradise. There is not much more you can ask of a companion on a mid-life journey. Except maybe a motorcycle. Neal Conan, now a news analyst for Hawaii Public Radio, former senior host of NPR's Talk of the Nation
A Moment with Strangers is a sweet, simple idea brilliantly realized. Like me, you may find yourself glancing through this book long after you thought you 'finished' it. Tim Cahill, author of Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and Hold the Enlightenment
Like the combination of prose and haiku in Basho s haibun, Olsen's essays blend urgent, observant prose with thoughtful, reflective photographs. The photographs never merely illustrate the essays; the essays never merely explain the images; sometimes essays are entirely composed of photos. Throughout the book, words and images are equally essential, equally engaging . . . As [Olsen] wrestles to understand what s before his eyes, we readers absorb his compulsion and feel the urge to look more closely, more intently at whatever we see, wherever we are. We come away inclined to more fully inhabit moments with strangers. Robert Root, author of Happenstance and Postscripts: Retrospections on Time and Place
In this admirable collection of essays and photographs, Olsen addresses the question central to most good literature how do we live, how do we respond to the things that matter to us? Whether tracking a storm or blizzard in the Midwest, watching a group of kite fliers in India, or eating at a wonderful diner in Montana after fighting fires there, Olsen follows the path of intense curiosity to moments of illumination and wonder. This book has something to teach us all. Doug Whynott, author of The Sugar Season and A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time.
Contents
1. Prologue: A Moment s Dance
2. Chasing Clouds
3. A Day in Paradise
4. Such Hope
5. Nine Variations on the Idea of Street Music
6. The Band
7. Whales, Trains, and Tea
8. India Air
9. Shutter Speed
10. Chasing Fire
11. Grace
12. What Hope
13. Notes toward a Philosophy of Breakfast
14. Late-Night Thoughts on the Wanting of a Motorcycle
15. Crossing Dakota: A Road-Trip Photo-Essay
16. To Catch a Blizzard
17. Dancing with Thieves
18. L Espérance
19. Postcard to Jules Verne
20. Pas de Deux
21. On Seeing Greenland
22. Epilogue: The Chase, Once More