THE SHARKS OF LAKE NICARAGUA

            Novelist White (The Mangrove Coast, 1998, etc.) skimmed the cream off his Outside magazine adventure-travel column for this collection of stouthearted, amusing essays.

            White is one game hombre who has for years stumbled forth over the boundaries of the day-to-day.  Yes, he is paid to get scared witless, to go peer over the last edge and report back.  Still, to make a horse’s ass of himself in dangerous, or at least compromising, circumstances – that takes moxie, and to survive, be it physically, or in terms of self-respect, takes a state of grace.  Here he finds himself in 16 hard or strange places, with the usual supporting cast of international low-rent odd fellows.  The lunacies for which his editors have volunteered him include dog-fighting in an F-16, dog mushing in Alaska (“I was being dragged by five speed-crazy sled dogs, dragged over hill and dale, maybe being dragged to death – or worse, to Nome”), and antiterrorist driving school (“If we don’t rally the nerve to explore our automotive limits…They’ll stop us, box us, then smoke us like cheap cigars”).  There are fishing stories, though for White “some people travel to fish, but I fish to travel,” and there are a couple of more reflective essays, the goofiness of the assignment a pretext for taking the political pulse of Nicaragua or triggering memories of his mother so pungent your eyes burn.  White often makes a reach for his gags rather than nesting them in his stories, but then that is part of his charm:  he’s not just capable of being a buffoon, he can be a bit of a jerk too, a good trick on the audience-identification front.  And he’s also worldly, informed, decent, a slap-up writer, and ready as he’ll ever be.

            First-class entertainments, just outrageous enough that when White comes to spin them to his grandchildren, they won’t believe a word.