
Great for beginners:
Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens

Great for Bug Out Bags:
SAS Survival Guide: How to Survive in the Wild, on Land or Sea

When there's no help coming:
The Ultimate Survival Medicine Guide: Emergency Preparedness for ANY Disaster
List of the best survival books for preppers (reviews below):
- Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens — General, Beginner
- The Prepper’s Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for Disaster — General, Beginner, Home
- Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit — Beginner, Bug Out Bag
- Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why — Skills, Self
- SAS Survival Handbook, Third Edition: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere — Field Guide, Fieldcraft, Bushcraft, Skills
- Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to over 200 Natural Foods — Field Guide, Food, Bushcraft
- Backyard Foraging: 65 Familiar Plants You Didn’t Know You Could Eat — Food
- The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource — Water
- The Survival Medicine Handbook: 3rd Edition — Medical
- Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Healthcare Handbook, Revised Edition — Medical
- The Complete Medicinal Herbal: A Practical Guide to the Healing Properties of Herbs — Medical
- The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair, 4th Edition via Black & Decker — Home, Skills
- Ham Radio For Dummies, 2nd Edition — Skills
- The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition — Home
- Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Ed — Food
- The Ultimate Prepper’s Guide — Home, Food, Skills
- When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake — Self Defense, Self
- 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide — Self Defense
- Field & Stream’s The Total Gun Manual: 335 Essential Shooting Skills — Self Defense, Skills
- A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster — Reasons to Prepare, Community
- Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath — Reasons to Prepare
- One Second After — Fiction
- MaddAddam Trilogy — Fiction
- Hatchet — Fiction
- Parable of the Sower — Fiction
Why you should trust us
This list is curated by preppers and survival instructors with 15 years of combined experience. Some are writers themselves, actively publishing prepping related material while working day jobs as university-level English professors.
How we picked and reviewed the best prepper books
Our goal with this curated list is to separate the noise from the value so you can quickly find the best books. It’s a little different than our other reviews — there’s just too many books to have an exhaustive list of winners and losers. Absence from this list doesn’t necessarily mean a book is bad.
We’ve spent countless hours tracking over 185 of the books most often recommended in the prepper community. We’ve read or at least partially reviewed most of them. It’d be great if we could fully read every book about preparedness and survival, but unfortunately that’s just not possible. We bought or borrowed every book, unless specifically noted in a review.
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Our search began by scouring the web for book lists, tallying frequently named and popular books in prepper forums and blogs, and poring over Amazon’s bestseller lists in relevant categories. We also asked other experienced preppers what books they’ve read and recommend. Then we looked at recommended reading lists in books we already knew and respected, consulted librarians, and took a hard look at our own collections.
Once we had our long list, we divided books into categories that made sense to us, and started culling.
Sometimes it’s easy to quickly tell if a book will be good or not — for example, it’s pretty easy to judge a self-published “prepper” book with amateur clip art on the cover and a sole focus on severe Doomsday scenarios. Beyond those quick smell tests, we used these criteria:
- Info that applies to most people rather than specialized expert knowledge
- More recent books over older books
- Books in print over books out of print
- Little or no political partisanship over more partisan books
- Books complete in themselves over books that referred to affiliated online or DVD materials
- Books from presses large enough to have a gatekeeping function over self-published books or books from micro-indie presses
- Books laid out to be easy on the eye and user-friendly, especially if the material relied heavily on diagrams or illustrations
- Books that encouraged problem solving over books that whipped up fear of problems
- Books that actually taught core concepts rather than memorization of meaningless lists
That shortened the long list until it made sense to get our hands on some physical copies and read them. In a few cases, we found books so excellent in some particular way that we included them despite a questionable trait. In those cases, we noted the issue in the review.
Our best prepper and survival books list will be updated over time
The current list is just the beginning of what we plan for our book recommendations. Over the months and years to come, we’ll be adding some new releases, out-of-print classics, small-press or self-published diamonds in the rough, and whatever else stands out as excellent.
Have a favorite book? Leave a comment and let us know! We keep a tally of recommendations, and if we frequently see a book suggested, we’ll buy and review it.
Best household emergency preparedness and beginner prepper books
Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens
Kathy Harrison, Storey Publishing, 2008
Great for beginners:
Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens
Harrison opens the book with stories of two hypothetical families riding out a winter storm with a long power outage. The unprepared family’s experience is typical of what most Americans suffer when a natural disaster strikes. It’s miserable in ways that will be familiar to anyone who’s read newspaper accounts of real disasters. The prepared family has practiced all the skills they need for a week without electricity. They have what they need and they know where to find it. They experience the disaster as an adventure and emerge feeling empowered.
In the chapters that follow, Harrison leads the reader through an introduction to the OAR cycle as applied to the individual, the immediate family (including pets), the close social circle, the systems of the home itself, and the car. Then, with all those elements in mind, she walks you through several kinds of disaster, from the common (power outage, fire), to the rare (pandemic, terrorism). A final section lays out processes for developing and practicing skills she calls “The Arts of Self-Sufficiency” in everyday life.
The Prepper’s Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for Disaster
Bernie Carr, Ulysses Press, 2011
The Prepper’s Pocket Guide: 101 Easy Things You Can Do to Ready Your Home for Disaster
Begin with the likeliest disasters, she tells us. For most people, financial setbacks are more probable and frequent than natural or national disasters. She insists we should declutter before we bring anything new into our homes, because it doesn’t matter what you have if you can’t find it.
Carr organizes her 101 easy things into chapters covering all the basic survival needs. The book’s brevity makes it a good starting point for an overwhelmed beginner, or an easy book to carry on a commute. It can’t function as a one-volume prepper’s library in miniature. For that, you’d want a book with more coverage, and one whose scope doesn’t end when the decision to bug out begins.
Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit
Creek Stewart, Betterway Books, 2012
Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit
We disagree with framing Bug Out Bags as “72 hour kits” — in our own Bug Out Bag guidelines, we think assuming you’ll only need to survive for 72 hours is too limiting and assumes you know what will happen in the future.
The book is organized around ten categories of need: water, food, clothing, shelter/bedding, fire, first aid, hygiene, tools, lighting, communication, and protection. Each category’s chapter explains what makes that particular need so important, and then discusses a variety of items that can meet it.
Each item has its advantages and drawbacks (weight, ease of use, etc.). Which items are most appropriate depends on the user’s situation (traveling with children or elders, setting out from an urban or rural home), and on the local conditions the user sets out into (desert in summer, boreal forest in winter, etc.). Stewart makes it easy to use the particulars of your life to sort your options into a manageable packing list.
Additional chapters cover: selecting the pack itself, special concerns for traveling with pets, organization and maintenance of the BOB, mental preparedness, developing a plan, and practicing skills. It doesn’t matter what you have in your pack if you can’t find it or don’t know how to use it. The checklist pages at the end of the book are well laid out and easy to use.
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
Laurence Gonzales, W.W. Norton, 2017 (Reprint, 2004)
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
The first section of the book focuses on how disasters actually unfold and the range of things people do when caught up in them. The science of disaster produces answers that seem counterintuitive in our Hollywood-saturated society. Gonzales wraps complex concepts from cognitive science in real-life stories as exciting as any adventure novel.
The second section focuses more on cautionary tales and exemplary survivors. Each chapter’s arresting narratives can be boiled down to a common problem you can recognize when you’re caught in it — inflexibility of plan, bending the map, etc. — and habits of mind you can practice in everyday life that may help you stay alive and help others in an emergency.
Best field guides for your Bug Out Bag
SAS Survival Guide: How to Survive in the Wild, on Land or Sea (New Edition)
John “Lofty” Wiseman, Harper Collins, 2010
Great for Bug Out Bags:
SAS Survival Guide: How to Survive in the Wild, on Land or Sea
His three most important principles of learning for the survivor are will to live, knowledge, and kit, in that order. “Survival is, above all, a mental exercise,” he says. That’s the foundation of everything else he teaches. The chapters organized around the knowledge and kit for particular needs, environments, and events all assume the centrality of the will to live.
That’s fortunate, because the broad effort to offer information for every possible situation inevitably means that no one situation can be covered in depth. Consider where you live, what environment you’re likely to face, and which kinds of disasters are most common in your area. Prepare for the common case. The knowledge and kit, to use Wiseman’s terms, that you need for bugging out are very different from the knowledge and kit for sheltering in place. It’s worth it to have both a comprehensive book on the domestic side of survival, and another for roughing it.
That said, if you can only carry one how-to book on your back, the book that covers everything outside your home is the one to bring.
Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to over 200 Natural Foods
Thomas S. Elias and Peter A. Dykeman, Sterling, 2009 (Reprint 1982)
Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to over 200 Natural Foods
Every entry has simple graphics to show what it’s used for and what you need to do to eat it safely. If you have a fire, you can forage for plants that must be boiled to be break down toxins; if you’re limited to what you can eat cold, you know at a glance which plants, and which parts of them, are safe.
Indexes by scientific and common names, and by Linnaean characteristics, supplement the photo-rich seasonal core of the book. An introduction offers nutritional information, cooking techniques particular to wild foods, notes on Native American uses of wild plants, and a consideration of ethics, sustainability, and common sense. The ethics will be familiar if you hunt or fish: leave enough behind for the population to bounce back. Endangered and threatened plants are not included. Mushrooms and other fungi are not included because the dangers of misidentification are too common and serious. The book also has a section on common poisonous plants with warnings and symptoms, at the end where you can find it in a hurry.
Best survival food and water books
The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource
Daisy Luther, Ulysses Press, 2015
The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource
Check out our review of the best emergency water containers to cover your minimum two weeks of home supplies.
If you live in a water-rich area and have assumed that will carry you, it’s worth learning how to harvest the safest water and handle it in ways that will keep you and your family from getting sick. Filtration, purification, boiling, and other methods are all here, along with non-obvious information about storage containers and practices.
Backyard Foraging: 65 Familiar Plants You Didn’t Know You Could Eat
Ellen Zachos, Storey Publishing, 2013
Backyard Foraging: 65 Familiar Plants You Didn’t Know You Could Eat
After an introduction on the safety issues of foraging and the basics of plant identification, Zachos organizes most of her chapters around plant types and common edible parts, such as greens, nuts, and tubers. A final chapter details techniques for preparation and preservation of wild foods. The book is for readers interested in the current foraging trends, and requires no previous knowledge.
Best medical books for preppers
The Survival Medicine Handbook: Emergency Preparedness for Any Disaster
Joseph Alton, MD, and Amy Alton, ARNP, Doom and Bloom Publishing, 2016

The Ultimate Survival Medicine Guide: Emergency Preparedness for ANY Disaster

The Survival Medicine Handbook: Third Edition
Most books on first aid focus on stabilizing and transporting the sick and injured, on the assumption that the goal is to get the patient to a modern medical setting. But what if no modern medical setting can be reached? The Altons, a retired medical doctor and nurse practitioner, respectively, wrote this book for readers with no previous medical background, to prepare them for situations of widespread emergency or social collapse.
Their case in point is Hurricane Katrina, after which hospitals were understaffed, undersupplied, and overwhelmed with patients in need. Even in temporary disasters, and certainly in long-term ones, laypeople can find that the buck stops with them. The authors’ goal is to help people become medical resources for their families and communities.
Sections on basic principles, prevention, and sanitation open the book. The following sections are organized by types of illness and injury that you’d find in an EMT textbook. The Altons present their information with an emphasis on flexibility and improvisation, training the eye and mind to find useful materials where no medical supplies are available. The book’s graphic design is a holdover from earlier editions, when the Altons self-published, with some whimsical use of obviously stock photos, but the quality of the book’s content outweighs those issues.
The final section on medications covers how to procure antibiotics that are safe for humans from veterinary sources, which do not require a medical license. Antibiotics raise issues of allergy, overuse, resistant microbes, and storage, all of which the Altons cover. Many preparedness books and sites try to cover antibiotic use for laypeople, but many of them give short shrift to these issues. It’s worth getting your information from medical professionals. The supply checklists for personal first aid kits, family first aid kits, and community clinics are the best we’ve seen.
Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Healthcare Handbook, Revised Edition
David Werner, Carol Thuman, & Jane Maxwell, Hesperian Foundation, 1992

Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook, Revised Edition

Where There Is No Dentist
The Complete Medicinal Herbal: A Practical Guide to the Healing Properties of Herbs
Penelope Ody, Dorling Kindersley, 1993
The Complete Medicinal Herbal: A Practical Guide to the Healing Properties of Herbs
Richly photographed to ensure correct identification of plants and their parts, The Complete Medicinal Herbal is the most user-friendly of the serious herbal medicine books for laypeople that we’ve found. Whereas many herbal medicine resources give only an herb’s name along with the maladies it treats, Ody’s book details which plant parts are suitable, which kinds of preparations to use (infusion, decoction, ointment, etc.), even which season those parts should be harvested in what season, when that matters.
One major section is organized by plant, another by malady. Both are intuitively laid out. The shorter section on making the various kinds of preparations also abundantly photographed and detailed, assuming no previous knowledge of the techniques. The Complete Medicinal Herbal is beautifully designed and photographed enough to be a coffee table book, well enough researched and explained to be a practical medical reference (with the usual caveats about not being intended to take the place of a doctor’s advice).
Best tradecraft and survival skills books
The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair, 4th Edition (Black & Decker)
Editors of Cool Springs Press, 2016
Black & Decker The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair
Ham Radio For Dummies, 2nd Edition
H. Ward Silver, For Dummies, 2013
Ham Radio for Dummies
See our own intro guide to Ham radio for emergency preparedness.
Best fieldcraft, homesteading, and gardening books
The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition: The Original Manual for Living off the Land & Doing It Yourself
Carla Emery, Sasquatch Books, 2012
The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition
Most chapters are organized around categories of plants and animals — all dairy animals together, all garden vegetables together, and so forth. The individual entries are impressively comprehensive. An entry on, for instance, pears has information on the tree’s needs for soil pH and light, which varieties are suited to different planting zones, what insects need to be attracted for pollination, how to tend the trees and harvest the fruit, and numerous recipes to prepare and preserve the fruit. Entries for animals include all the analogous information, including breeding and butchering.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living doesn’t go into great depth about solar power or other off-grid sources of electricity. Emery’s approach to country living does not require it. If yours does, you will want to supplement with other books.
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition
Toby Hemenway, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Traditional agriculture, with its rowed crops, can require backbreaking work every season and requires a constant struggle against weeds and pests. By contrast, permaculture organizes plants, landscape features, and insects, into small human-made ecosystems. “Food Forests” interplant different species closely to meet each other’s needs, so chemical inputs are unnecessary. The early years of a permaculture landscape can involve backbreaking labor, digging up suburban grass lawns to build swales and berms, but an established food forest is mostly self-regulating.
Edible landscaping and permaculture aren’t quite synonymous, but there’s a lot of overlap. Preppers looking to turn their lawns into food sources should absolutely have this book in their libraries.
The Ultimate Prepper’s Guide: How to Make Sure the End of the World as We Know It Isn’t the End of Your World
Jay Cassell, Ed., Skyhorse Publishing, 2014
The Ultimate Prepper's Guide: How to Make Sure the End of the World as We Know It Isn’t the End of Your World
The Ultimate Prepper’s Guide does surprisingly well with images and diagrams, considering the paper quality. There’s more about homesteading than you usually see in books that aren’t specifically about homesteading. The book keeps its title’s promise to address the end of the world as we know it .
When writing on his own, Cassell specializes in books on hunting, fishing, and shooting. A heads-up to readers who are troubled by graphic explanations of how to disassemble dead animals or shoot living ones: Cassell and his team are clinical and thorough.
Best self defense books
When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake
Tim Larkin, Little, Brown and Company, 2017
When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake
He sets out to persuade readers who have no idea how to use violence in self defense or defense of others that they shouldn’t wait to change their thinking until a threat is upon them. Only if we look at violence as a neutral tool that doesn’t care who uses it or for what can we be prepared to use it for good. Although this is an argument that many people at the center and on the left of the political spectrum will find uncomfortable, Larkin’s argument is not a partisan one. The categories he cares about are social versus asocial.
In social violence, the combatants are operating in the same set of imagined rules, what’s at stake is usually position in the pecking order, and the violence may be disrupted by efforts to deescalate or intervene. In asocial violence, the aggressor doesn’t feel bound by the victim’s social norms. The violence may even be intended as an attack on the norms themselves. “At the end of the day,” says Larkin, “all violence has the potential to be a matter of life and death. The difference with asocial violence is that death and destruction are not its by-products; they are its purpose.” He proposes that everyone should be prepared to respond to asocial violence without hesitation with absolute commitment to self defense.
Much of the book covers tactics and techniques to use when confronted with asocial violence. Tactics and techniques can be found in many places. What makes this book unusual is its focus on the psychological, emotional, and social patterns ingrained in us that make us hesitant to use violence. Larkin spends a good many pages also on how to tell when violence is social or asocial, and what behaviors might work to prevent violence from breaking out, or at least to avoid being in the most dangerous positions when it does.
100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation
Clint Emerson, Touchstone, 2015
100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation
The entertainment part is well represented here, with sections titled “Steal a Plane” and “Wage Psychological Warfare.” Even if you never need to follow the storyboard to perform any of the more cinematic special ops skills, there are plenty that deal with smaller-scale interpersonal threats and violence. For instance, the sections on how to break your hands out of handcuffs, zip ties, and duct tape would be of interest to anyone concerned about home invasions.
The Total Gun Manual (Field & Stream): 335 Essential Shooting Skills
Phil Bourjaily and David Petzal, Weldon Owen, 2012
The Total Gun Manual (Field & Stream): 335 Essential Shooting Skills
All the gun jargon that can seem impenetrable elsewhere is explained clearly here. The large ideas, processes, and artifacts that go into being a skilled and responsible gun owner are broken down into manageable pieces. Diagrams, illustrations, and photographs are plentiful and useful. We looked at dozens of books on firearms for readers starting from zero background knowledge, and this was the only one that made the cut.
Best books about reasons and context for emergency preparedness
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Rebecca Solnit, Viking Penguin, 2010
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
The countercurrent to that good news is that elites and leaders of institutions sometimes see the improvised bottom-up organization of their less elite fellow citizens as reason for panic. Elite panic can lead to violence and threats of violence, as when New Orleanians trying to evacuate after Hurricane Katrina were turned back at gunpoint by police from a wealthy suburb. Beliefs matter, Solnit reminds readers many times, and when people who have more resources believe that people who have fewer resources are savages, the haves tend to treat the have-nots savagely, and then to blame their victims.
Because beliefs matter, Solnit’s mission in this book is to replace Hollywood cliches with evidence. If we want to prepare for disasters, one thing to prepare for is an eruption of neighborly kindness. If we welcome it and foster it, we can fare well. If we ignore it and assume our neighbors are threats to our survival, we become part of the problem, and we lose out on the survival benefits of beloved community — to say nothing of what could be the time of our lives.
Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath
Ted Koppel, Crown, 2015
Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath
The book’s second section, “A Nation Unprepared,” gives a dismaying picture of the many layers of public and private inertia that keep us from doing anything to protect the grid. No institution or organization comes out of this section of the book looking good, though many devoted individuals are shown trying heroically to get reluctant corporations and government entities to prepare against a cyberattack on the grid. Most private citizens, especially urban dwellers, look unlikely to outlast even the briefest of the disruptive scenarios Koppel’s sources predict.
Tentative hope arrives in the book’s third section, when Koppel travels the country to interview a diverse group of preppers. His research trip to interview high officials in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, who lead what is probably one of the most prepared demographics in the world, is a highlight of the book, and shows a model that any community could learn from. If the majority of Americans developed personal disaster plans, even without a lot of resources, that would be a huge change, but Koppel thinks it would still not be enough to get our population through two years with the grid mostly down.
If FEMA had a comprehensive plan for such a scenario and made sure every adult in the country knew what their part of that plan would be, we might have a brighter prognosis for recovery. But due to legislative gridlock, shortsighted industry lobbying, and the information overload in an executive branch trying to prepare for hundreds of kinds of threats at once, such a comprehensive plan is nowhere in sight. Koppel’s hope in 2015 was that the American people would demand a plan of their leaders that the nation prepare against a cyberattack on the grid, for both prevention and response.