The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua: True Tales of Adventure, Travel, and Fishing - Softcover

White, Randy Wayne

4.1

181 ratings by Goodreads

9781585741755: The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua: True Tales of Adventure, Travel, and Fishing

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1585741752 ISBN 13: 9781585741755

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 2000

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Whether he’s engaging in mock aerial combat or riding an Iditarod 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, 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 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—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 mesmerized by the potential of undiscovered places and the promise of endless adventure in unfamiliar territory, from Florida to Borneo and everywhere in between. A leader of the new breed of thick-skinned, high-endurance adventure travelers of the 1990s, Randy Wayne White uniquely extols the pleasures of being “alone and on the move.”

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About the Author:

RANDY WAYNE WHITE, a former flats-fishing guide, wrote the popular "Out There" column for Outside magazine for many years. His books include "Batfishing in the Rainforest" and the Doc Ford mystery series. He is now a monthly columnist for Men’s Health magazine and lives on Pine Island, off the west coast of Florida.

From Kirkus Reviews:

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, circumstancesthat 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 deathor worse, to Nome''), and antiterrorist driving school (``If we dont 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. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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