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    Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
    Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
    Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend
    Ebook281 pages6 hours

    Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend

    By Joshua Blu Buhs

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2009
    ISBN9780226502151
    Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend

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    • 4/5
      The story of the evolution of the "wildman" in American culture, from P.T. Barnum's "What-Is-It?" to purported evidence of Bigfoot in the 21st century. Much of the book details alleged sightings, footprints etc. of Bigfoot and the infighting among the people investigating--and hoping to profit from--the phenomena, including suspected hoaxers. On the cultural side, one of the author's primary arguments is that for white, working-class men, Bigfoot hunting and Bigfoot-related entertainments offered an authentic, masculine counter force to the phony and "feminized" culture of consumption that arose in the post-World War II era. It's also worth noting that Buhs lays his cards on the table in the preface: "I still don't think Bigfoot exists--indeed writing this book actually gave substance to what was before only a vague kind of skepticism."

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    Bigfoot - Joshua Blu Buhs

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