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Reply to: Best survival and prepper books Posted November 21, 2019

Warning, eyestrain length comment here; apologies. First, compliments on a few of your choices.  Specifically the Atwood and Butler recommendations.  Octavia Butler has been one of my favorite authors since the first book of hers I read (Survivor) back in my late teens, some forty years ago.  As far as other books, I’m most intrigued by the titles addressing foraging for food and the medical books, two issues that will be of paramount importance if SHTF, and knowledge of same will do a lot more in helping you to survive than being able to hit a target at a hundred meters with a Mini-14.  Criticisms: it’s your web site and you can do what you want, but I personally would never recommend a book I had never read to anyone.  As others have pointed out, Amazon rankings and word of mouth in the community are not reliable guides as to the quality of information those books contain. I have to turn a thumbs down on your recommendation of One Second After.  I found it childish and utterly irrelevant to any real survival issues.  Why?  Because the only real EMP weapons anyone has consists of atomic bombs and if one hits us, the collapse of information infrastructure is going to be the least of your worries.  In that event you’d be far wiser to instead realize that those high-altitude EMP bursts will without doubt be followed up by many more warheads detonating at, shall we say, a much lower altitude.  In any EMP attack your real problems are going to be fireball, blast overpressure, and fallout, not your dead iPhone or no internet. As far as any sort of a sneak attack intending to decapitate command and control, it would be utter suicide for any country to do this as the most hardened parts of the US military are those addressing the launching and targeting of ballistic missiles and anyone, but anyone, who launched even a few at us would be getting a massive response before their warheads even got here.  Besides the absurdity of the premise, I also found the book to be more of the old-white-guy-with-fantasies-of-heroism type of a story like the very worst of Tom Clancy.  Which is every book Clancy ever wrote. And now the good stuff: Fiction — the first appearance of what we now call a survivalist or prepper in literature appeared in Robert Heinlein’s 1964 novel Farnham’s Freehold.  When the book was written an established term for such a person didn’t even exist.  It’s not his best book, and about halfway in the book takes a bonkers turn into a completely different type of story, but most preppers would probably find the first half fascinating if a little bizarre.  It’s all based on Heinlein’s own preparations, including a shelter beneath his home, so there’s a lot of practical stuff in it.  Heinlein was a prepper before I was even born.  Another novel is the must-read book War Day by Whitley Streiber and Jim Kunetka.  It’s compelling and well-written fiction, coupled with the most exhaustive real-world research anyone has ever done for a novel about nuclear war.  Back in 1986 I gave my copy to a close relative whose job was being a junior nav and weapons officer on a SAC B52, and the novel left him depressed as hell.  Why?  “Because they got it all right.  Everything.” he told me.  And for fans of One Second After, if you want to get an idea of what a real EMP attack might look like you need to be reading War Day instead of One Second After. A nonfiction resource is anything written by a guy named Mel Tappan, who wrote a survivalist column for Guns and Ammo magazine back in the 70s and 80s.  I believe it was he who actually coined the term “survivalist” and he was tremendously knowledgeable about an enormous variety of subjects within that field.  He published several books, but I would also recommend trying to find a collection of the columns he wrote for the magazine.  One of the books he strongly recommended was a translation of a Chinese text called something like “The Barefoot Doctor” which was issued by the Chinese government to officials in rural areas that had literally no facilities or doctors for people to turn to.  It was purportedly extremely basic and assumed no medical knowledge on the part of the reader, and as such could be a valuable reference.  Another resource that simply can’t be ignored is the huge number of field manuals and the like issued by the US military establishment over the years, which are all in the public domain and can be downloaded en masse from many websites.  Examples would be the manuals used to train combat medics or corpsmen, or the ones used to train Special Forces or clandestine troops.  A real standout would be the “Improvised Weapons” manual that shows how to make everything from napalm to directional Claymore-type mines, constructing firearms from piping, and using strike-anywhere matches as both propellant and priming compound for improvised reloading of empty cartridge cases.  The US Army Ranger Manual is also really good for that sort of thing. Finally, a subject I’m most intimate with, self defense and personal combat.  I was a metro police officer in a city with a violent crime rate that pretty much always surpasses those of Detroit, Chicago, DC, Miami, et al. and I’ve been bitten, stabbed, shot at, gone to the ER more than once to get sewn up, and have wrestled guns off of people many times.  I’ve also taken many psychopaths into custody at gunpoint, and/or after having to subdue them physically. I also trained in Judo, Hapkido, and Jujutsu for over a decade.  As you can probably imagine, I’m extremely skeptical about most books on combat or self-defense and I’ll be the first to tell you that 95% of the tripe you will learn in most of the traditional martial arts schools should be considered exercise and not training for combat. If you have the time to devote to it, Judo, Western Boxing, and Muay Thai are all excellent preparation for unarmed combat, though it could take you months or years to reach even a basic level of competence.  I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that you can’t learn how to fight from a book.  Aside from the massive amount of basic and advanced defensive tactics training I received as a police officer, and the martial arts training I did, I also studied every fighting art that I could find reputable literature on and successfully incorporated techniques from them in my own repertoire without the benefit of even informal training in those techniques.  I know they worked because I used them, frequently.  Two or more people with common sense and decent training texts can achieve quite a lot in skills development if they’re motivated. Unfortunately, the single most valuable reference I can recommend is a book that’s almost impossible to get outside of the police community, that being the PPCT system developed by Bruce Siddle.  It’s the most commonly taught system in law enforcement in this country, if not in the world and my personal experience was that I learned more about effective fighting in that initial 50 hours of training in the academy than I learned in over a decade of Asian martial arts training.  And again, I know it works because I’ve had to use it countless times.  That stuff is for when it might not be appropriate to put someone in their grave, but who still need to be shut down.  For when things get grim, the single best book I’ve ever studied is the deceptively thin WW2 commando training text “Get Tough” by W.E. Fairbairn.  It’s in the public domain and can be downloaded from multiple sources (google it).  Everything in the book is simple, nasty, and brutal beyond the norms of decency.  Nothing in it requires the abilities of a professional athlete or a brainiac genius to execute.  A word of warning though, some of the techniques in it are so dangerous that they simply can’t be practiced at full strength unless you want to break the neck or spine of the person you train with so some caution and common sense are an absolute requirement.  Finally, I’ve been collecting manuals on what the US military calls “Combatives” (and before that “hand-to-hand combat”) from multiple branches and the armies of other nations going back beyond WW2.  Most of the older stuff wasn’t nearly the quality of “Get Tough” but going into modern times the techniques have improved.  I recently ran through some new things with a few old Army buddies who have for multiple reasons kept up their proficiency in the stuff, and have seen the latest field manuals on the subject from both the Army and Marine Corps.  The most recent information is nice and brutal and simple, and is vastly superior to what they taught back in the 80s and earlier.  I can’t hype these military training manuals strongly enough, because if you search diligently you can find many or most of them free to download. Another option has been buying CDs loaded with literally hundreds of PDFs of military manuals.  They are the best and most valuable source of the “Dummies” guide to everything from carpentry to improvised explosives to how to treat a traumatic amputation in the field.  I have a lot more books and the like I could recommend, but I think I’ve wheezed on long enough now.  I hope some of that was helpful.

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Reply to: Best survival and prepper books Posted November 21, 2019

Warning, eyestrain length comment here; apologies. First, compliments on a few of your choices.  Specifically the Atwood and Butler recommendations.  Octavia Butler has been one of my favorite authors since the first book of hers I read (Survivor) back in my late teens, some forty years ago.  As far as other books, I’m most intrigued by the titles addressing foraging for food and the medical books, two issues that will be of paramount importance if SHTF, and knowledge of same will do a lot more in helping you to survive than being able to hit a target at a hundred meters with a Mini-14.  Criticisms: it’s your web site and you can do what you want, but I personally would never recommend a book I had never read to anyone.  As others have pointed out, Amazon rankings and word of mouth in the community are not reliable guides as to the quality of information those books contain. I have to turn a thumbs down on your recommendation of One Second After.  I found it childish and utterly irrelevant to any real survival issues.  Why?  Because the only real EMP weapons anyone has consists of atomic bombs and if one hits us, the collapse of information infrastructure is going to be the least of your worries.  In that event you’d be far wiser to instead realize that those high-altitude EMP bursts will without doubt be followed up by many more warheads detonating at, shall we say, a much lower altitude.  In any EMP attack your real problems are going to be fireball, blast overpressure, and fallout, not your dead iPhone or no internet. As far as any sort of a sneak attack intending to decapitate command and control, it would be utter suicide for any country to do this as the most hardened parts of the US military are those addressing the launching and targeting of ballistic missiles and anyone, but anyone, who launched even a few at us would be getting a massive response before their warheads even got here.  Besides the absurdity of the premise, I also found the book to be more of the old-white-guy-with-fantasies-of-heroism type of a story like the very worst of Tom Clancy.  Which is every book Clancy ever wrote. And now the good stuff: Fiction — the first appearance of what we now call a survivalist or prepper in literature appeared in Robert Heinlein’s 1964 novel Farnham’s Freehold.  When the book was written an established term for such a person didn’t even exist.  It’s not his best book, and about halfway in the book takes a bonkers turn into a completely different type of story, but most preppers would probably find the first half fascinating if a little bizarre.  It’s all based on Heinlein’s own preparations, including a shelter beneath his home, so there’s a lot of practical stuff in it.  Heinlein was a prepper before I was even born.  Another novel is the must-read book War Day by Whitley Streiber and Jim Kunetka.  It’s compelling and well-written fiction, coupled with the most exhaustive real-world research anyone has ever done for a novel about nuclear war.  Back in 1986 I gave my copy to a close relative whose job was being a junior nav and weapons officer on a SAC B52, and the novel left him depressed as hell.  Why?  “Because they got it all right.  Everything.” he told me.  And for fans of One Second After, if you want to get an idea of what a real EMP attack might look like you need to be reading War Day instead of One Second After. A nonfiction resource is anything written by a guy named Mel Tappan, who wrote a survivalist column for Guns and Ammo magazine back in the 70s and 80s.  I believe it was he who actually coined the term “survivalist” and he was tremendously knowledgeable about an enormous variety of subjects within that field.  He published several books, but I would also recommend trying to find a collection of the columns he wrote for the magazine.  One of the books he strongly recommended was a translation of a Chinese text called something like “The Barefoot Doctor” which was issued by the Chinese government to officials in rural areas that had literally no facilities or doctors for people to turn to.  It was purportedly extremely basic and assumed no medical knowledge on the part of the reader, and as such could be a valuable reference.  Another resource that simply can’t be ignored is the huge number of field manuals and the like issued by the US military establishment over the years, which are all in the public domain and can be downloaded en masse from many websites.  Examples would be the manuals used to train combat medics or corpsmen, or the ones used to train Special Forces or clandestine troops.  A real standout would be the “Improvised Weapons” manual that shows how to make everything from napalm to directional Claymore-type mines, constructing firearms from piping, and using strike-anywhere matches as both propellant and priming compound for improvised reloading of empty cartridge cases.  The US Army Ranger Manual is also really good for that sort of thing. Finally, a subject I’m most intimate with, self defense and personal combat.  I was a metro police officer in a city with a violent crime rate that pretty much always surpasses those of Detroit, Chicago, DC, Miami, et al. and I’ve been bitten, stabbed, shot at, gone to the ER more than once to get sewn up, and have wrestled guns off of people many times.  I’ve also taken many psychopaths into custody at gunpoint, and/or after having to subdue them physically. I also trained in Judo, Hapkido, and Jujutsu for over a decade.  As you can probably imagine, I’m extremely skeptical about most books on combat or self-defense and I’ll be the first to tell you that 95% of the tripe you will learn in most of the traditional martial arts schools should be considered exercise and not training for combat. If you have the time to devote to it, Judo, Western Boxing, and Muay Thai are all excellent preparation for unarmed combat, though it could take you months or years to reach even a basic level of competence.  I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that you can’t learn how to fight from a book.  Aside from the massive amount of basic and advanced defensive tactics training I received as a police officer, and the martial arts training I did, I also studied every fighting art that I could find reputable literature on and successfully incorporated techniques from them in my own repertoire without the benefit of even informal training in those techniques.  I know they worked because I used them, frequently.  Two or more people with common sense and decent training texts can achieve quite a lot in skills development if they’re motivated. Unfortunately, the single most valuable reference I can recommend is a book that’s almost impossible to get outside of the police community, that being the PPCT system developed by Bruce Siddle.  It’s the most commonly taught system in law enforcement in this country, if not in the world and my personal experience was that I learned more about effective fighting in that initial 50 hours of training in the academy than I learned in over a decade of Asian martial arts training.  And again, I know it works because I’ve had to use it countless times.  That stuff is for when it might not be appropriate to put someone in their grave, but who still need to be shut down.  For when things get grim, the single best book I’ve ever studied is the deceptively thin WW2 commando training text “Get Tough” by W.E. Fairbairn.  It’s in the public domain and can be downloaded from multiple sources (google it).  Everything in the book is simple, nasty, and brutal beyond the norms of decency.  Nothing in it requires the abilities of a professional athlete or a brainiac genius to execute.  A word of warning though, some of the techniques in it are so dangerous that they simply can’t be practiced at full strength unless you want to break the neck or spine of the person you train with so some caution and common sense are an absolute requirement.  Finally, I’ve been collecting manuals on what the US military calls “Combatives” (and before that “hand-to-hand combat”) from multiple branches and the armies of other nations going back beyond WW2.  Most of the older stuff wasn’t nearly the quality of “Get Tough” but going into modern times the techniques have improved.  I recently ran through some new things with a few old Army buddies who have for multiple reasons kept up their proficiency in the stuff, and have seen the latest field manuals on the subject from both the Army and Marine Corps.  The most recent information is nice and brutal and simple, and is vastly superior to what they taught back in the 80s and earlier.  I can’t hype these military training manuals strongly enough, because if you search diligently you can find many or most of them free to download. Another option has been buying CDs loaded with literally hundreds of PDFs of military manuals.  They are the best and most valuable source of the “Dummies” guide to everything from carpentry to improvised explosives to how to treat a traumatic amputation in the field.  I have a lot more books and the like I could recommend, but I think I’ve wheezed on long enough now.  I hope some of that was helpful.