From Publishers Weekly
For exciting adventures in feral pig-hunting, salt-water fly-fishing or crocodile poaching, it's hard to imagine a better guide than White. In these stories, originally published in different forms in Outside magazine, White (Batfishing in the Rainforest) proves his mettle as an incisive humorist and a first-rate travel journalist. A "desire not to be whacked" leads him to an antiterrorist driving school, where, with hilarious effect, he learns the ins and outs of avoiding bullets, rockets and bombs while operating a motor vehicle. In fighter-pilot training, he overcomes "sympathetic ocular/auditory response" ("If bounced around in an airplane, my eyes begin to water, so it appears as if I am weeping while I upchuck") and smokes his opponent with imaginary 20mm. cannons. White has a knack for the unexpected adventure. An innocent search for Pepto-Bismol in Panama City ends in a crocodile-hunting expedition. But it isn't until the book's final (and title) piece that White showcases the full range of his abilities as a writer. During his quixotic search for freshwater sharks, he becomes as immersed in the culture of the country as a 220-lb. American driving a Toyota Land Cruiser can be. He chases a pig into a sacred vestry, disrupting a wedding ceremony, and later gives shining new baseballs to children whose love of the game rivals his own. The portrait of Nicaragua and its people that emerges is a refreshingly unpoliticized history, skillfully interwoven with personal experience.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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.
