Review: Chasing the Thrill by Daniel Barbarisi

I love a good treasure hunt. I even created a treasure hunt birthday party for one of my kids when they were small. More than I like participating though, I like reading about them. I loved The Westing Game and Treasure Island when I was younger so this non-fiction look into the Forrest Fenn treasure hunt by author and casual hunt participant Daniel Barbarisi was right up my alley.

Combining both his own experiences trying to solve the riddle of where Fenn left his treasure with the history of the hunt, positive and negative, and the community surrounding the hunt, especially the most well-known searchers, Barbarisi looks at what compels people to join in a hunt of this kind, some even to the point of bankrupting themselves, and what compels a person like Forrest Fenn, eccentric as he was, to create the hunt in the first place. He is even-handed and fair in his reporting on the culture, the rumors, and the mythology of the search for Fenn’s treasure. Getting involved as a searcher himself gives the recounting a nice, participatory first person aspect that pure reportage would not have offered. There is some repetition here and there remain some unanswered questions but overall, this was an engaging read about a fascinating cultural phenomenon. Just don’t do too much research into it before reading if you want to maintain the rising tension of the tale.