Book Review: The Unoffical Hunger Games Wilderness Survival Guide

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Our regular readers will remember that last year we reviewed Creek Stuart’s Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag. Today Creek’s latest book, The Unoffical Hunger Games Wilderness Survival Guide is being released and we were lucky enough to receive a review copy just in time for this review. Like Creek’s other book, this one is also full of useful information (see the page sample to the right). Let’s dive in and see what we have in store this time.

Creek uses details from the Hunger Game book series to illustrate specific preparedness concepts, such as specific situations with individual characters like Katniss or Peeta to relate the skills represented in that fictional scenario with a real world survival or wood craft example. I found this to be a fun and engaging approach for someone who is familiar with the books. This approach may have limited impact for someone who has no knowledge of the characters and why that skill was critical to their survival, or even for someone who only watched the first movie. However, given the title and the suspected audience, I think this has the chance to pull non-preppers in and give them their first exposure to these concepts.

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Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag – Book Give Away

Back in May, I pre-ordered the book “Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72-Hour Disaster Survival Kit”. When it arrived a short time later I read through it and was immediately impressed with the job the author Creek Stewart had done. As I was reading it the thought kept emerging that this book was exactly the sort of detailed how-to that we like to do here at Utah Preppers, but on a larger scale. As it turns out, the book initially started out as a blog post on the art of manliness blog. After receiving a good response, Creek decided to work on expanding the concept into a comprehensive how to guide.
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Quick Skinning, Cleaning and Butchering a Deer

These days, most of us drop our game off at the butcher on the way home and go back a few days later and pick it up in nice white butcher paper. That’s all fine and good for now, but what are we going to do if we have to hunt for survival and can’t just drop the animal off to let somebody else do all the work? I’ve done it myself before and I’m sure I could do it again without any real problems, but if you’re hunting for survival the last thing you want to do is ruin your meat by doing something stupid!

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Review: The Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers

Walking along the book aisle in Costco the other day, I came to a rather sudden stop as a specific book caught my eye. With a name like The Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency Used by the Mormon Pioneers, can you blame me?  This was obviously a book stocked for a local audience, so I hope our non-Utah readers can find a copy.  Author Caleb Warnock is a local (Alpine, Utah) writer, year-round gardener, and teacher of “Forgotten Skills” classes.  It also helped when I noticed one of the people listed in the special thanks section is a friend of mine, and local sci-fi author (how’s that for a tight-knit Utah Valley). Also at only $11 or so, any tidbit that might help will likely pay dividends well over the purchase price of the book.

This book also stood out to me, because I often wonder *how* my family managed to get enough food to live.  My mom’s side of the family was that oft-discussed “hearty pioneer stock”.  However I have noticed that while many farmed to live, I have a long history of blacksmiths and military.  There is no hiding that this must be because I inherited a really lousy black-thumb, they took up other trades because of this family curse. I’m one of those people who has to work really hard to make part of his garden succeed.  I enjoy blaming my heritage on this, as it cannot be some failing of my own, right?  So I felt driven to read this book, and find out how they managed to live, despite my inability to grow enough of the right foods in the wasteland of Utah.

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Book Review: What’s Wrong With My Plant?

The other day I picked up a new gardening book from the hardware store. Its cover wasn’t cluttered with photographs like so many other gardening and home improvement books; in fact, the only photo on the cover was of an obviously-distressed leaf. The rest of the cover was largely devoted to the full title of the book: What’s Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?): A Visual Guide to Easy Diagnosis and Organic Remedies, by David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth. This was actually the first thing that caught my eye. I don’t like when books try to glam themselves up in an attempt to conceal the vapid content inside. This book looked like it was ready to get down to business, and so I picked it up and started leafing through it. It didn’t take me long to decide to buy it. Continue reading “Book Review: What’s Wrong With My Plant?”

Book Bomb – How to Survive the End of the Word as We Know it

A couple days ago we inadvertently advertised that it was Book Bomb day for Rawles new book How to survive the End of the Word as We Know it.  It is actually today .   Sorry about that – we got some wires crossed!

James Wesley Rawles, Author of the renowned survivalblog, as well as the novel Patriots (which we reviewed here before) has a new book coming out shortly.  It’s been available for pre-order for a little bit now, but everybody was requested to wait until today (9/25/09) to actually place pre-orders.  This makes a big difference to companies such as amazon, which use the purchase velocity in their rankings.

From JWR today:

Today is “Book Bomb” Day for my new book, “How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times”. My goal for the Book Bomb is a surge of orders is that will drive the book’s Amazon sales rank into the top 50, overall. (When I last checked, it was at #160.) Many thanks for waiting to order until today!!

Here’s a link to order How to survive the End of the Word as We Know it from Amazon – order today and help show that Prepping is cool!

Book Bomb – How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It

This is a little reminder for those that might have already heard, or a great intro for those that haven’t.  James Wesley Rawles, Author of the renowned survivalblog, as well as the novel Patriots (which we reviewed here before) has a new book coming out shortly.  It’s been available for pre-order for a little bit now, but everybody was requested to wait until today (9/25/09) to actually place pre-orders.  This makes a big difference to companies such as amazon, which use the purchase velocity in their rankings. Continue reading “Book Bomb – How To Survive The End Of The World As We Know It”

Survival Book Review: “Patriots: A novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse”

This is the second of a number of preparedness related book reviews that we are planning. See our first review on One Second After. If there is a specific book or other resource that you would like us to review, please tell us in the comments.  You should also review our preparedness bookshelf post for some other titles that you may want to check out yourself.

Patriots
Patriots

For this review we are trying something a little different. Nearly all the authors on this site have read this novel, often in several editions so several of us will be offering our thoughts on this most recent edition.

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Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide

Since we haven’t had a humor post recently (and boy do I need one), I decided to do a little review of one of my favorite books.zsg-cover The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks.  Now who among us hasn’t felt some joy in responding to the question, “What are you prepping for” with a glib reply of “For the oncoming Zombie Invasion”?  If you haven’t ever used that response, you should try it sometime, and feel the joy. Continue reading “Book Review: The Zombie Survival Guide”

Preparedness Bookshelves

patriotsI’m not saying I have the Ultimate Book Collection or even that I have a complete collection of Prepper books, but I do have a decent collection of books on preparedness and Pioneer/Primitive Living (see the photo of my bookshelf) and I’ve read most of them cover to cover. I’m constantly on the lookout for good prep books and buy one or two a month to read. I love getting referrals to good books – whether they’re instructional, reference or fictional (prep based novels) I like having other people tell me what they thought was good/fun/valuable.

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