The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua

Whether he's engaging in mock aerial combat or riding an Ididarod sled, Randy Wayne White is one of America's most adventurous travelers. In this collection he studies anti-terrorist driving techniques, dives for golf balls in an alligator-infested pond at a country club, hunts his fellow man with a paint gun, ice-fishes for walleye with X-ray-stunned night-crawlers, and goes pig-shooting with Dr. Pavlov. With self-effacing optimism, White captures the joys and fears of wandering the earth's surface with an eclectic cast of weirdo fellow-travelers -- a frog that won't jump, a group of expatriate Brits who've developed an interesting cure for "road jaundice", and even a mad Australian scientist.

Though he rarely finds what he's looking for -- like the legendary landlocked bull sharks of Lake Nicaragua, or the secret to successful winter fishing on a Minnesota lake -- he develops a Zen-like "passion for the means" and a rare ability to revel in the rib-aching humor of each exotic trip.

In the end, White leaves the reader as mesmerized as roadkill by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory, from Florida to Borneo and everywhere in between. As important to the new breed of thick-skinned, high-endurance adventure travelers of the 1990s as Jack Kerouac was to the drug-crazed drifters of the 1960s, Randy White uniquely extols the pleasures of being "alone and on the move".