THE SNAKES THAT ATE FLORIDA

A greatest-hits collection by the journalist and prolific author.

Frazier was born to be a magazine writer, quick to discern between a meaningful vignette and a subject for a long-form story. Here he gathers examples of both, originally published in venues such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic. The vignettes are everywhere, sketches that probe little-known corners of the human experience, such as a prize-winning rodeo bull rider from Kingston, New York, who didn’t have to travel far to win again at “Loretta Lynn’s Longhorn World Championship Rodeo,” held at Madison Square Garden way back in 1974. “Each bull has his own set of statistics,” Frazier writes, “just like a baseball player: how many people he’s bucked off, how many times he’s been ridden, how many times he’s made the national finals—­things like that.” His visits with the plainspoken NPR commentator Kim Williams, the doyenne of Missoula, Montana, yield dozens of elegant observations, some well ahead of their time, as when she stands in Trump Tower on a visit to New York and declares, “I think someday all the rich people are going to take our resources and go live in a big, warm dome high above us somewhere.” Her takeaway: It’s inevitable, so make do with less. Among the longest pieces are a sardonic examination of life in Russia in the early years of the Putin regime, with Putin himself somewhat at a crossroads about how to celebrate the overthrow of the last tsar: “The example of, say, the civil unrest of early February 1917 may not appeal to a leader who faced widespread protests against his own autocratic rule.” It’s all highly readable, with some great turns of phrase (“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die”). And if you want to know how prisoners score contraband cell phones, here’s where to turn.

Frazier is an exemplary prose writer, and aspiring practitioners couldn’t ask for a better textbook.