Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend [Hardcover]

Joshua Blu Buhs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2009

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 worldwide—despite the fact that nearly everyone knew it was a hoax. Though Bigfoot may not exist, there’s no denying Bigfoot mania.

With Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs traces the wild and wooly story of America’s 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 Bigfoot’s 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 beast—and 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 scientist’s skepticism but an enthusiast’s deep engagement, Buhs invests the story of Bigfoot with the detail and power of a novel, offering the definitive take on this elusive beast.

Editorial Reviews

From 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. (May)
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From The New Yorker

In 1832, the British Resident in the court of Nepal reported that the natives had spotted a “furred, upright, tailless demon.” In 1989, a Canadian woman and her grandson thought they saw a Sasquatch and joked that they should offer him a beer. Buhs traces the journey between these perceptions of elusive wild men and discovers a story of twentieth-century shifts in American culture and class. Bigfoot was both a product of the postwar ascendance of mass culture and a reaction to it, capturing the imagination of those who longed to “touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” The book is most interesting when revisiting men’s adventure magazines and rural “four-waller” movies. It is silliest when asserting that “by imagining themselves into the body of Sasquatch, white working-class men could imagine themselves as black, as women, could come in contact with their own souls.”
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (May 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226079791
• ISBN-13: 978-0226079790
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,294,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Rise and Fall and Rise of a Legend, May 2, 2009

By 

William Holmes "semloh2287" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Hardcover)

For some reason, the publishing industry (even the academic press) often issues two or three similar books about a given subject more or less at the same time. In May 2009, we have Joshua Blu Buhs "Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend" competing with Michael McLeod's Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot.

Both books are skeptical about the existence of Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch and similar legendary beasts. And both books are more sociological history than snipe hunt, focusing on colorful adventurers and scientists like Tom Slick, Rene Dahinden, Peter Byrne, Ivan Sanderson, Bernard Heuvelmans, Grover Krantz and others who pursued elusive beasts and propogated stories about them.

Buhs' work is the more scholarly of the two, featuring extensive research, footnotes and social commentary. It also has the more ponderous academic theme, which is roughly that the hunt for Bigfoot appeals to manly working class outdoorsmen who long to show nerdy scientists that they know far less than they think about about what's really out there. I'm not sure I buy that thesis, but it's plausible and it provides a useful framework for describing, in great detail, the rise and fall and transformation of Bigfoot and its cryptid cousins.

McLeod, in contrast, surveys the field at a higher level and his book is more readable and chatty. If you are looking for a good folklore and legend book to read on a long plane flight, I'd recommend McLeod; Buhs' book is a better selection for a quiet evening in a nice library.

All that said, true believers should beware: you may not enjoy Buhs' book because it assumes that Bigfoot and its cousins don't exist. For students of folklore, skeptics, and those who are just curious about the cultural phenomenon that Bigfoot has become over the last 50 years, you'll find Buhs' book to be an engaging diversion.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Buy this if you're absolutely sure there are Sasquaddle, June 3, 2009

By 

Scott Herriott (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Hardcover)

Overall, a good view of the phenomenon from the perspective of one who is skeptical of relic hominids/hominoids existing.
A bit subtlely snarky at times (as opposed to Daegling's "Bigfoot Exposed" which I found to be more even-handed in its presentation of a skeptical viewpoint on the subject). Great detail concerning how Bigfoot has become entrenched via the mass media and consumerism, along with interesting details involving the relationships between big name players who have searched for the beast.
Definately recommended for those who have a tendency to believe a lot of what they read and hear concerning Sasquatchiana.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched, but poorly written, August 10, 2010

By 

jorio (Seattle WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (Paperback)

Mr. Buhs put together a well-researched historical narrative of the search for the Yeti and Sasquatch over the last century, but his disdain for the searchers and believers could not be more apparent. As a student of the sociological value of myth, I appreciated the way Buhs successfully tied societal upheaval to this quest for authenticity, but Buh's continual imposition of his personal feelings about the matter, rather than letting the reader make the logical conclusions from the presented facts, muddies the book and makes it seem a harsh diatribe. Mr. Buhs is not an academic and not above passing severe judgement on his subject: His denouement outright declares that the believers are "losers in the contest for dignity", but Mr. Buhs may well wish to consider his own. Most definitely not recommended.