Adam V

I’m not sure who this book is for. With a title like “The Secret History of Bigfoot” it’s sure to mostly attract people who are at least a little interested in the Bigfoot phenomenon. Then this books spends its entirety making fun of and belittling ‘bigfooters.’ It seems like the author wanted to name this book “Everyone Who Believes in Bigfoot is a Sucker, a Rube and Probably Racist” but the publisher turned it down. For a book about ‘the secret history of Bigfoot’ very little history is discussed, and none of it was secret. This book is mostly about the author going around meeting Bigfoot hunters and having a lot of fun with them, and then still deciding that they’re losers and liars. Even with people who are very nice to him. The author spends the whole book disrespecting the people who have been very kind to him, including one instance of him sneaking beers into a dry event, and another where he got piss on a sleeping bag that was generously loaned to him by a famous bigfooter, and then haphazardly cleaned up. I don’t like to use the phrase “virtue signaling” but the author very much wants the reader to know he’s not like other old white men. Even though I mostly align with the author politically, the politics in this book were way too much. He spends too much time comparing people who believe in Bigfoot to “Trumpers” and Q-anon believers, which to most people is a grave insult. The only part of this book I actually enjoyed was the chapter on the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. Maybe if the author wrote an entire book about that, it would have been better. I’m not even sure what the authors goal was with this book? Maybe he’s some kind of energy vampire or masochist who gets off on people being mad at him. I wanted very much to DNF this book pretty much the whole way through, but I figured I should read a book by a skeptic in the field of Bigfoot, but the author is such a stick in the mud about it, that this book isn’t even a little fun.