Prudent Prepping: One For The Reading Pile

The dust has settled and the First 72 Hours have passed. Follow along as I build a long term plan via Prudent Prepping.

My close friends know that I am a prepper, so I get asked some odd questions and see some funny links and articles. I also get some books that I don’t really know how to classify, or know whether to keep or pass back after reading. This is one of those books.



Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life 
by Neil Strauss

https://amzn.to/2Lh19E8

This book is really difficult to categorize. Really, really hard. I’m only about halfway through it and the topics veer around like a drunk rollerblader on an ice arena. You have these chapter headings:

• Orientation
• Five Steps
• Escape
• Survive
• Rescue

Seems pretty normal, right? Some of those titles could have come right out of a Les Stroud book, no problem. But let me share several sub-chapter headings with you:

• How To Become Immortal In One Easy Step is discussing cryo-freezing yourself;
• Why They Hate Us But Like Our Movies, a modern take on Bread and Circuses;
• The Britney Spears School Of Pregnant Surfing, a segue from celebrity ghost writing to leaving the country.

From the back cover: 

• Why You Should Think of the Zoo as a Restaurant
• Proper Care and Handling of Hawaiian Tropic Girls
• Where to Swim Across the Border
• Bikes of the Apocalypse

After looking at who the author is, his other books and for whom he writes (the New York Times), this book reads to me like a collection of articles that was pitched to, and rejected by, the NYT editors. I say this after looking at the copyright page (2009), and also after noting that one of the chapters mentions preparations for the Y2K non-disaster. All of this isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing, but it is not what I was expecting to read.

Again I admit that I am only 1/3 to 1/2 through the book, and once I got over the style of writing, I have a better feel for this book. It isn’t a survival guide or a lesson plan, but rather how this particular man went about learning how to start prepping. Right from the first chapter, where he admits to being nauseated thinking about slaughtering and dressing a goat, Neil Strauss obviously doesn't have a practical background. That’s really okay, since many of us didn’t grow up on farms and had limited chances to hunt and dress game. As a writer for the Times, Strauss gets a chance to ‘fail spectacularly’ by interviewing fringe groups and meeting odd characters, with few consequences other than a girlfriend that appears to be less and less willing to go along with some of the wilder stunts.

I don’t know if I would recommend this book as a Must Read today, since many things have changed in the 10 years since it was published, but I would list it as a book to read for the parts that apply to how Blue Collar Prepping works. It’s just going take some work to filter out those parts.

The Takeaway

• Something that looks like a good book but seems poor at first may have some interesting bits if you stick it out.

The Recap

• Nothing was purchased this week; the book is a loaner from a friend.
• EMERGENCY by Neil Strauss is available from Amazon for $13.80 with Prime, or Kindle for $10.49.

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If you have comments, suggestions or corrections, please post them so we all can learn. And remember, Some Is Always Better Than None!

NOTE: All items tested were purchased by me. No products have been loaned in exchange for a favorable review. Any items sent to me for T&E will be listed as such. Suck it Feds.