Road Hogs

Climb into one of America’s classic luxury cars from the 1960s and 1970s, swaddle yourself in yards and yards of fine Corinthian leather, scan the gigantic dashboard filled with esoteric dials and gauges that you can never hope to understand, twist the oversized ignition key, and listen to those coffee-can-sized pistons crank over in that enormous V-8 lurking under that vast expanse of hood. Feel that throbbing power burbling beneath an accelerator pedal the size of a Japanese hotel room, and you’ll know what once made the American auto industry great. Road Hogs celebrates this greatness, as expressed through the magnificent performance luxury cars that rolled out of Detroit during the classic era, like the Cadillac Eldorado, Chrysler 300, Buick Electra, Chevy Monte Carlo, Buick Riviera, and many more.

"A master of both distilled insight and utter nonsense" (The Believer), Ian Frazier is one of the most gifted chroniclers of contemporary America. Hogs Wild assembles a decade's worth of his finest essays and reportage, and demonstrates the irrepressible passions and artful digressions that distinguish his enduring body of work. Part muckraker, part adventurer, and part raconteur, Frazier beholds, captures, and occasionally reimagines the spirit of the American experience. He travels down South to examine feral hogs, and learns that their presence in any county is a strong indicator that it votes Republican. He introduces us to a man who, when his house is hit by a supposed meteorite, hopes to "leverage" the space object into opportunity for his family, and a New York City police detective who is fascinated with rap-music-related crimes. Alongside Frazier's delight in the absurdities of contemporary life is his sense of social responsibility: there's an echo of the great reform-minded writers in his pieces on a soup kitchen, opioid overdose deaths on Staten Island, and the rise in homelessness in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg. In each dizzying discovery, Hogs Wild unearths the joys of inquiry without agenda, curiosity without calculation. To read Frazier is to become a kind of social and political anthropologist--astute and deeply engaged.

Hogs on 66 mixes food, fun, and the freedom of the road in colorful photographs, stories, and information about Hog-friendly hangouts, where to buy your Harley stuff, road tips, profiles from the road, biker wedding spots, and several hundred favorite recipes from towns along the Route. You'll learn all about butt darts in Vega, Texas and other behind-the-scenes tales from Harley tours down 66. You'll also meet Harley celebrities who've traveled the road, such as Franklin Graham and Reba McIntyre.

"Engaging hybrid - part lyrical travelogue, part investigative journalism and part jeremiad, all shot through with droll humor." --The Atlanta Journal Constitution In 1867, John Muir set out on foot to explore the botanical wonders of the South, keeping a detailed journal of his adventures as he traipsed from Kentucky southward to Florida. One hundred and fifty years later, on a similar whim, veteran Atlanta reporter Dan Chapman, distressed by sprawl-driven environmental ills in a region he loves, recreated Muir’s journey to see for himself how nature has fared since Muir’s time. Channeling Muir, he uses humor, keen observation, and a deep love of place to celebrate the South’s natural riches. But he laments that a treasured way of life for generations of Southerners is endangered as long-simmering struggles intensify over misused and dwindling resources. Chapman seeks to discover how Southerners might balance surging population growth with protecting the natural beauty Muir found so special. Each chapter touches upon a local ecological problem—at-risk species in Mammoth Cave, coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee, climate change in the Nantahala National Forest, water wars in Georgia, aquifer depletion in Florida—that resonates across the South. Chapman delves into the region’s natural history, moving between John Muir’s vivid descriptions of a lush botanical paradise and the myriad environmental problems facing the South today. Along the way he talks to locals with deep ties to the land—scientists, hunters, politicians, and even a Muir impersonator—who describe the changes they’ve witnessed and what it will take to accommodate a fast-growing population without destroying the natural beauty and a cherished connection to nature. A Road Running Southward is part travelogue, part environmental cri de coeur, and paints a picture of a South under siege. It is a passionate appeal, a call to action to save one of the loveliest and most biodiverse regions of the world by understanding what we have to lose if we do nothing.

The Pearls gang returns with characteristically misanthropic humor (but with more leather): no self-aggrandizing is too flagrant for Rat, no subject is too erudite for Goat, and no sensory input is too basic for Pig. All topics are fair game for Stephan Pastis and his brass-knuckle punch lines. Comic strip censors, apathetic baristas, and IRS employees are all strongly advised to laugh or get out of the way. Pearls Hogs the Road also features three comic strips illustrated by the legendary Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes, who ended a 19-year hiatus from the comics page to collaborate with Pastis.

"It's in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear," writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman's insightful memoir. "Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of the living." To ensure that the world of Jimmye Hillman's childhood in Greene County, Mississippi during the Great Depression doesn't slip away, he has gathered together accounts of his family and the other people of Old Washington village. There are humorous stories of hog hunting and heart-wrenching tales of poverty set against a rural backdrop shaded by the local social, religious, and political climate of the time. Jimmye and his family were subsistence farmers out of bare-bones necessity, decades before discussions about sustainability made such practices laudable. More than just childhood memories and a family saga, though, this book serves as a snapshot of the natural, historical, and linguistic details of the time and place. It is a remarkable record of Southern life. Observations loaded with detail uncover broader themes of work, family loyalty, and the politics of changing times. Hillman, now eighty-eight, went on to a distinguished career as an economist specializing in agriculture. He realizes the importance of his story as an example of the cultural history of the Deep South but allows readers to discover the significance on their own by witnessing the lives of a colorful cast of characters. Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs is unique, a blend of humor and reflection, wisdom and sympathy—but it's also a hard-nosed look at the realities of living on a dirt farm in a vanished world.