In On the Rez and Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier offered idiosyncratic musings on isolated communities--culturally or geographically--and the odd, fascinating people that live within them. Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces is a diverse collection of essays and journalistic pieces that maintains that central focus, while also demonstrating Frazier's boundless, endearing curiosity and his ability to draw humor and strange flashes of insight from the most unlikely of sources.
The title essay manages to be both exceptionally unusual and entirely indicative of Frazier's style and concerns. Few other writers would choose wild hogs as a likely vector for a discussion of the United States' culturally divided landscape, but he does so with an extended tangent on the correlation between the number of wild hogs in a state and support for President Bush in the 2004 election. Or, as Frazier puts it: "Wild hogs seem to be everywhere that the red-state red can't get any redder and starts to turn into a Confederate flag." These off-the-wall observations are par for the course for Frazier, who seems to follow his every fleeting thought to its frequently humorous, occasionally moving conclusion. Consider, for example, "Hungry Minds," which focuses on a writing workshop that he operated adjacent to a church-based soup kitchen. He writes about his students: "Somehow, writing even a few lines makes the person who does it more substantial and real."
In the case of Hogs Wild, it's Frazier's writing that makes depressive fishermen, generals who died perversely underappreciated, the victims of Hurricane Sandy and many more remarkable individuals substantial and real. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books