Barbarisi writes with gusto and portrays the eccentrics he encounters with a candor that never quite slips into mockery; he sums up Beep as 'a Renaissance man of the frivolous.' He can also make a landscape come alive ... Barbarisi, now a senior editor at the Athletic, occasionally gets too caught up in his subject. His chapter on searching for a very different kind of treasure — what lies in old galleons at the bottom of the ocean — runs on too long and probably should have been cut entirely. He is more judicious in covering the conspiracy theories hatched by disappointed seekers during the hunt and afterward, but let’s draw a veil over how the contest ended. You can find out online, of course, but Barbarisi tells the story so well that you should resist any form of peeking ahead and leave the matter in his capable hands.

Journalist Barbarisi spent several years researching and writing this mesmerizing account of a modern-day treasure hunt, which reveals a whole subculture of Indiana Jones types willing to travel across the country and invest life savings in the search for something special ... Armchair adventurers will be riveted right up to the suspenseful conclusion.

In this lively read, a journalist sheds objectivity and searches for riches alongside his subjects ... Sadly, as Barbarisi painfully illustrates, most hunters drawn to Fenn’s puzzle lacked the skill set to solve it. Parsing a literary text for hidden meaning was a task for an English major, not an army of retired soldiers with inflatable rafts and rappelling gear ... Chasing the Thrill illustrates the creeping narcissism in today’s selfie-taking, blog-publishing, Instagram-posting society. Barbarisi’s hunters twist Fenn’s clues to suit their fancies ... Chasing the Thrill leads the reader on an engaging armchair treasure hunt, a welcome escape in these waning days of covid. Daniel Barbarisi’s bold gamble — inserting himself at the story’s center — pays off. The writer emerges as a sympathetic protagonist, and his participation buys him entrée into a secretive and mistrustful club.

Reading Daniel Barbarisi’s Chasing the Thrill might feel a bit like watching a Discovery Channel documentary, but the book is quite a yarn. In fact, it’s an exhaustive account of one of the oddest episodes in the crowded annals of bizarro Americana ... Readers will soon realize that Chasing the Thrill is yet another shaggy-dog story, this one almost 350 pages. While stalling until the treasure is finally uncovered, Mr. Barbarisi pads out the book with extenuated examinations of every possible facet of the tale and too-long introspective passages as he interviews solvers, goes on the hunt with them, ponders Fenn’s motives and so on. There’s also lots of detail about Blaine’s orb, Williams’s hare and all the other treasure hunts, tie-in books and gimmicks. But shockingly, in all those pages you won’t find a single picture of Fenn, or the treasure chest and its contents, or the man who found it. You’ll have to resort to Google Images for that ... the long-awaited resolution of the story is one of the least satisfying parts of the book ... Readers may rightly feel that, like the rest of Fenn’s hunters, they’ve been denied the big payoff they so richly deserve.

[A] captivating account of the exploit of an eccentric community of treasure hunters who scoured the Rocky Mountains from 2010 to 2020 in search of New Mexico art dealer Forrest Fenn’s hidden chest of gold and jewels ... Barbarisi eventually dropped out of the hunt, but he interviews the searcher who discovered the treasure chest in a Wyoming forest in June 2020 and gets an up-close look at its contents. Shot through with dramatic plot twists, colorful personalities, and insights into the nature of obsession, this rollicking account will appeal.

The tale of an infamous and perilous modern-day hunt for buried treasure in the Rocky Mountains ... In this lively book, the author provides a journalistic account of Fenn and the obsessives who attended an annual 'Fennboree' and picked apart the poem on websites ... The book is weakest when Barbarisi takes extended detours into stories of similar book-based treasure hunts and other lost treasures as well as during an account of his trip to Florida to meet other treasure hunters. Despite the meaningful context, the Fenn search is dramatic enough ... A well-reported insider’s study on the engrossing and alarming fervor a search can inspire.