Ian Frazier is an American writer and humorist. He wrote the 1989 non-fiction history Great Plains, 2010's non-fiction travelogue Travels in Siberia, and worked as a writer and humorist for The New Yorker. - Wikipedia
This book needs a subtitle to entice both the general and the scholarl reader; but even if it were identified as "writings of a traveller in settled part of America," readers would still find surprises in Frazie unusual wit and diligent scholarship.