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Last August, two men in rural Georgia announced that they had killed Bigfoot. The claim drew instant, feverish attention, leading to more than 1,000 news stories worldwidedespite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, theres no denying Bigfoot mania.
With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of Americas favorite homegrown monster. He begins with nineteenth-century accounts of wildmen roaming the forests of America, treks to the Himalayas to reckon with the Abominable Snowman, then takes us to northern California in 1958, when reports of a hairy hominid loping through remote woodlands marked Bigfoots emergence as a modern marvel. Buhs delves deeply into the trove of lore and misinformation that has sprung up around Bigfoot in the ensuing half century. We meet charlatans, pseudo-scientists, and dedicated hunters of the beastand with Buhs as our guide, the focus is always less on evaluating their claims than on understanding why Bigfoot has inspired all this drama and devotion in the first place. What does our fascination with this monster say about our modern relationship to wilderness, individuality, class, consumerism, and the media?
Writing with a scientists skepticism but an enthusiasts deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast.
Review:
"This sprightly, if sometimes overblown, study finds the elusive hairy wildman of the Pacific Northwest lurking everywhere. Independent scholar Buhs (The Fire Ant Wars) skeptically but affectionately surveys the evidentiary traces of bigfoot and his yeti and Sasquatch kin in sightings, tracks, sideshow exhibits and film, but his focus is on the megapod as cultural signifier. To the white working-class men who are his biggest fans, Buhs contends, bigfoot is an icon of untamed masculinity, a populist rebel against scientific elites, the last champion of authentic reality against a plastic, image-driven, effeminate consumer society. (Ironically, Buhs notes, bigfoot's career as advertising mascot and tabloid teaser also makes him a touchstone of consumerism.) Buhs's rote application of race-class-gender theory — 'By imagining themselves into the body of Sasquatch, white working-class men could imagine themselves as black, as women, could come in contact with... repressed and forbidden desires' — yields more academic cant than insight; his oft-invoked white proles feel almost as legendary and stereotyped as the creature itself. Buhs is at his amused best when following the exploits of bigfoot's human handlers — the colorful band of true believers, hoaxers and pseudo-documentarists who constructed this greatest of all shaggy-hominid stories. 35 b&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
That truth is not required to make a splash in the media might be a new wrinkle in our political discourse, but it's old hat in the realm of urban legends. Take the uproar over Bigfoot — aka Sasquatch, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman — the hulking hairy hominoid who supposedly haunts the damp, scratchy forests of the American Northwest and the snowfields of the Himalayas. Even though no Bigfoot has... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) ever been captured, dead or alive; no footprint has ever been authenticated; no credible image preserved on film; no hair, nail or dropping tested positive, the monster refuses to die. Independent scholar Joshua Blu Buhs concedes in his intermittently engaging cultural history "Bigfoot" that he started the project with a "vague kind of skepticism" over Bigfoot's existence and ended with firm disbelief. No matter. Buhs' real mission is to track not the creature itself but rather its shadow in the popular imagination. And this he executes with commendable zeal and infinite patience. Buhs even elaborates a high-minded sociocultural-economic thesis to give the enterprise weight and authority. "Stories about Bigfoot were a way for (working-class) men to confront and work through their anxieties," to "feel powerful" as they reclaimed their "dignity" from "elite" skeptics, to prove that they "understood reality, its workings better than scientists." Fortunately, for most of the book, Buhs leaves that thesis in the background and focuses instead on the adventures of a large, loopy cast of misfits, dreamers, drifters, hucksters, passionate amateurs and wild-eyed anthropologists. Swiss-born Rene Dahinden read a piece about the Abominable Snowman two months after immigrating to Canada in 1953 and decided on the spot that he'd found his calling. "It seemed that maybe I'd been searching all my life for a chance like that," he said later. Dahinden left his wife, kids and any hope of a normal existence to pursue Bigfoot, but a lifetime of searching turned up nary a footprint. Roger Patterson, a debt-ridden confidence man from Eastern Washington, captured Bigfoot on film in October 1967 — or so he told Hollywood producers to whom he tried (and failed) to peddle his few seconds of grainy footage. As the fruitless hunting parties, dreary academic conferences and fringe Web sites drag on, the whole business begins to seem shoddy and embarrassing. Buhs does roll out some entertaining stories, lots of strange lore and a few valuable insights, but he ends up straining too hard for meaning. Brawny and crafty though Bigfoot may be, he just can't stand up under all the baggage Buhs piles on him. Popular debunker Albert Jack devotes a chapter to Bigfoot in his whirlwind endeavor to solve "the world's most puzzling mysteries" in 200-odd pages. But unlike Buhs, this breezy self-appointed "mystery buster" steers clear of ideas, cultural context or sociological motives. Urban legends, unsolved crimes, quirks of nature and supposed miracles elicit only one question in Jack's mind: Did it really happen? If he can squeeze the answer into a few "short, sharp, informative sections you can read on the train," he's done his job. If he can milk it for a few laughs, so much the better. Jack combines the skeptic's raised eyebrow with the wink and leer of a British music hall MC. After 12 pages skimming some of the same ground that Buhs stomps for entire chapters, Jack concludes that Bigfoot was nothing but a hoax perpetrated by lugs out to have fun. With tongue in cheek, he races from the rumor that Paul McCartney died in 1966 to the high incidence of aviation and boating disasters in the Bermuda Triangle to the true cause of Marilyn Monroe's death. If these and other assorted freaky occurrences have been bothering you, Albert Jack's your man. But frankly, for all his heavy breathing and chest-thumping, I'd rather run around the forests chasing Bigfoot with Mr. Buhs. Call me elitist, but I'll take an earnest theorist over a glib nose-thumber any day. Reviewed by David Laskin, who is the author of 'The Children's Blizzard' and the forthcoming 'American Crucible: How the Great War Transformed an Immigrant Generation', Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
New Hardcover
Joshua Blu Buhs
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0 reviews
$29.00
In Stock
Product details
279 pages
University of Chicago Press -
English9780226079790
Reviews:
"Publishers Weekly Review"
by Publishers Weekly,
"This sprightly, if sometimes overblown, study finds the elusive hairy wildman of the Pacific Northwest lurking everywhere. Independent scholar Buhs (The Fire Ant Wars) skeptically but affectionately surveys the evidentiary traces of bigfoot and his yeti and Sasquatch kin in sightings, tracks, sideshow exhibits and film, but his focus is on the megapod as cultural signifier. To the white working-class men who are his biggest fans, Buhs contends, bigfoot is an icon of untamed masculinity, a populist rebel against scientific elites, the last champion of authentic reality against a plastic, image-driven, effeminate consumer society. (Ironically, Buhs notes, bigfoot's career as advertising mascot and tabloid teaser also makes him a touchstone of consumerism.) Buhs's rote application of race-class-gender theory — 'By imagining themselves into the body of Sasquatch, white working-class men could imagine themselves as black, as women, could come in contact with... repressed and forbidden desires' — yields more academic cant than insight; his oft-invoked white proles feel almost as legendary and stereotyped as the creature itself. Buhs is at his amused best when following the exploits of bigfoot's human handlers — the colorful band of true believers, hoaxers and pseudo-documentarists who constructed this greatest of all shaggy-hominid stories. 35 b&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
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