I read Anatomy of a Beast by Michael McLeod, cover to cover, but I'm gol-durned if I know why I did so. A bad habit, finishing bad books. And it is a bad book -- badly written and badly edited. Well, I'm exaggerating. It's not all that bad. There's enough material in its 222 padded-like-an-old mattress pages to make a good 2200 word essay. Why is this book published by the University of California Press when there are so many serious academic manuscripts unable to find a publisher. Anatomy of a Beast has "trade book" written all over it -- the breathless first-person narrative, the transparently-contrived Quest, the anecdotal style.
Good golly, Miss Molly, I'm allowing myself to get carried away.
What's it about? Anatomy of a Beast examines the Bigfoot legend. Finds it false, a concoction of fakery and gullibility. So far so good. But that's as far as it goes. There's no persuasive analysis of the phenomenon and no serious attempt to relate it to other frauds, conspiracy theories and other spiritualisms and mass delusions.
Why is the famous Bigfoot film of 1968 still taken seriously years even after the man who wore the gorilla suit has confessed? I don't know. Nor do I know why crop circles are given tv-time after the man who perpetrated the fraud described exactly how he did so. Why are there posters on billboards all over my town, today, advertising "A Course in Miracles" to be offered by a guy whose credential is that he just returned from India having studied with some revered swami (and this 250 years after Hume's Essay on Miracles)?
Why do people -- apparently sensible people -- ask me if I think that Shakespeare really wrote the plays? Why do a majority of Americans not "believe in" evolution?
Has the Age of Reason been cancelled?
A better, more challenging discussion of Bigfoot and other "cryptozoological" fantasies might have earned a place in the story. Not this disappointing book.
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