Skye Moody is obsessed by oceanic debris; she seems to comb beaches incessantly and imagines the stories of pink plastic propellers and mysterious bones the way other people see shapes in clouds. Like wandering flotsam, she goes with the tide of her inquiring mind--a piece of driftwood occasions an Icelandic history lesson featuring Siberian wood and sapling-munching sheep. She writes about ambergris, which at the turn of the nineteenth century was valued more highly than gold; amber found along Baltic seashores; cargo cults, candles and the Sargasso Sea. She takes a few side trips to Leonard Bernstein's swimming pool and a vodka-fueled Finnish wake held to mourn summer's departure. She profiles other flotsamists, like performance artist and activist Jay Critchley, who specializes in creating art from Cape Cod beach whistles (you'll have to look that one up in the book yourself), or John Anderson, whose collection has been featured in Smithsonian magazine. She celebrates the lowly barnacle: "A barnacle's life is not necessarily boring. True, if you were stuck to a boulder that never moved from its position on the tide line, life might prove a yawn. But imagine being attached to a cargo vessel, traveling across the oceans to exotic ports where you mix and mingle with other barnacles stuck to other cargo vessels . . . I know humans with duller lives."This is a fine book for beachcombers and for the land-bound with a fondness for fascinating facts. Try inserting this into the next conversational lull at dinner: In 1990, a container vessel lost 80,000 Nike athletic shoes in a storm in the North Pacific. Six months later, they started washing up on beaches from Oregon to Canada's Queen Charlotte Sound. The interesting thing is why some Nikes headed into northbound currents while others went south--the slight toe curvature in left- and right-footed shoes caused the lefties to tack northeastward, while the others turned south. If that doesn't float your boat, there is more, much more, to choose from in this engaging book.--Marilyn Dahl