Customer Reviews

Abominable Snowmen: Legend Comes to Life

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Since this book first appeared in the early 1960s, it has proven to be the basic text book for understanding this mystery. The reason for this is not that Sanderson includes all the eyewitness and other accounts concering mystery hominids/hominoids or that he surveys the entire planet in looking into this mystery. Sanderson's strength is that he was a biologist and brought the rigor of his dicipline with him. Sanderson not only describes the action, Sanderson tells you why these mystery creatures are found where they are found. He explains fringe areas and montane forests and their significance in a biological explanation of what is happening. In short, Sanderson's book gives this mystery a predictive value, telling the reader where creatures should be seen based on the geography and biology of where they have been seen to date. Anyone wishing to understand mystery hominds/hominoids should consider Sanderson's work essential and the fundamental work in the field. This holds true as much today as the day it first appeared.

Still Amongst the very best ever written on the subject. The late Ivan Sanderson, a respected zoologist of his time, was well ahead of most in the scientific community. But maybe that was because he was known for his many hours of actual fieldwork, and not just the college classroom. I rate "Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come To Life" in the top 5 of all time. Almost like new everytime I read it. Some of the most classic stories in Bigfoot lore were first widely published in this book.

This is one of the great classics of Bigfoot research. Without this book, the study of Sasquatch and similar creatures probably wouldn't be what it is today.

Very well written, with a sense of ironic humor.

Ignore the cheesey cover; the content of this book shows a scientific rigor and thoroughness nearly unseen today. A joy for the scientific reader and anyone who enjoys elegant nature writing.

Written by one of the great naturalists of the 20th century on a topic his straight, narrow, intstitutional colleagues would not touch: the pervasive presence of relic hominids on the inhabited continents (this book does not deal much with Europe; at his death, apparently Sanderson did not realize that the Wildmen common in European history were actually Neanderthals/yeti/bigfoots).

A must-have for any student of bigfoot, along with Myra Shackley's: Still Living?: Yeti, Sasquatch and the Neanderthal Enigma.

It was Sanderson's success with this book that made him persona non grata with mainstream science: If Sanderson is right, most mainstream scientists are just silly dabblers who ignore obvious evidence about the world around them. This book created serious turmoil in the scientific community, whose gatekeepers did their best to kill the reputation of its messenger, the author.

Be informed. Be wowed. All the traditional cultures and subcultures of the Americas and Central Asia have a name for the Big Man. For good reason. And when you're done with this book, check out [...] for recent sightings. There are thousands posted. You will slowly get a creepy feeling: this thing is real.

This book is essentially the Dead Sea Scrolls of modern Bigfootery. Ivan Sanderson was a very verbose writer of tremendous flourish and wide knowledge. He used his intelligence and enthralling writing style to craft a Tolkein-like world in which hominids long thought extinct are in fact alive and well in hidden mountains, forests, and even the edges of our cities and towns. It's genuinely exciting stuff (as long as you don't look too hard for evidence that would stand scientific scrutiny).

Folk tales from around the globe are repeated with the suggestion that they might just be based in reality. This is indeed something that seemed possible in the '60s, when the world still seemed amazingly huge (though not as unlimited as during the '20s and '30s). Sadly, with the increasing pressure placed on the natural world by mankind, and the massive amounts of time, money, and manpower that have been spent exploring nearly every last corner of the terrestrial world, the idea of tribes of Neandertals and troops of Gigantopithecus lurking just over the next hill seems less likely now than they did 50 or 60 years ago.

Still, this book shows how one man can essentially kick start an entire modern myth. Hypothetical skull reconstructions of the hypothetical hominids are offered up. Reconstructions of feet from modern and ancient creatures are compared to those of Bigfoot and the yeti. Genuinely useful vegetation and geographic maps are presented along with discussions of ecosystems and ecology. This is GREAT Stuff!

Do yourself a favor and buy this book if you don't already have it. It's essential reading for anyone who's interested in the possibility of nonhuman primates running amok on 5 continents yet remaining completely undiscovered even 50 years after the book's publication.

Excellent book to add to anyone's library. If you enjoy the mystery of the Bigfoot creature, you will appreciate this book. The author does a good job of providing factual information that assist the reader in making an objective opinion on their existence.

For its era, Sanderson's book presented remarkably strong and thorough coverage. I do not pretend that Sanderson is Heuvelman's scientific peer in any way, shape, or form; yet Sanderson has clearly paid as much attention to journalistic sources as has his fellow.

What troubles one more than the book is the packaging. Recall that this is a 1960 work in 2006 clothing. Thus, while we see, e.g., the Minnesota iceman on the cover, we don't see him in the text: recall that the iceman incident occurred in 1968! The same goes for "Patty," and I'm glad we don't descry the famous still image of the Patterson-Gimlin film on the cover, but it seems likely to show up on a subsequent reprint.

It also intrigues me that, while Sanderson clearly reveals the international scope of his travels and his data-collection activities, he seems terminologically lightweight. He discusses the experiences of Yucatan natives with diminutive proto-humans but never uses the term "Alux," and he speaks of variegated Australasian adventures but fails to mention the Tjangara, the Lo-An, the Tullamurri, or the Yowie.

Bear in mind what you're getting, and note carefully and clearly that the cover is just that--a cover, by no means a careful assemblage of historically appropriate photographs and sketches--and you should be reasonably happy with Sanderson's work. Yet, even though Heuvelmans devoted only a fraction of his monumental opus to ABSMs, I still find that the Belgian's work overpowers the Scot's--by far!