SHARKS OF LAKE NICARAGUA, THE by Randy Wayne White - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK

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 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.