Books

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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Upcoming Giveaway!


Next week we’ll be posting a review of the Backyard Food Production DVD. The producers of the DVD have been kind enough to send us a copy of the DVD to reward one of our lucky readers.

We will be selecting one winner at random from those who comment on the review post that will be published next week. Complete details on how to enter to win will be included in the review post.

In the meantime, check out this DVD preview.
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Book Review: All New Square Foot Gardening

I first heard about square foot gardening a few years ago from a friend who swore by it. Looking at his garden, I could see why: he had a bounty of chiles and tomatoes to make any salsa enthusiast drool. At the time, I was unaware that there was a book involved; I thought that it was only a fad. Turns out there’s a little more to it than that.

I picked up All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew last year towards the end of the growing season. After careful consideration, I have broken the emphasis of this book into four main points: (more…)

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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!

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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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Survival Book Review: One Second After

I’ve just finished reading One Second After
by William R. Forstchen – I received it two days ago – I couldn’t put it down.  This is an excellent book that I fully recommend every Survivalist/Prepper/Anyone Else read.  Seriously, this book is one of those that will help to open people’s eyes to just how fragile we are and just how stinkin’ hard it is going to be to survive TEOTWAWKI.

The book is based on an EMP event and most of the things in it are pretty close to all the research I’ve seen on EMPs.  The survival story is quite well researched and explored as well.  The book covers the time period from when an EMP event occurs to one year later and includes several of the same type of survival scenarios we read in Patriots.  The great thing about this book is that it makes you think broadly about survival and just how prepared you really are for it.  Reading it made me think of some areas where I can improve my preps but also made me feel that I was well prepared in several areas.  The saddest part of this book is the realization of just how bad it will be for the wholly unprepared, which is a large majority of our population.

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Evacuation Preparedness List Review part 2

This is the fourth installment of the Evacuation Preparedness Kit Series.  The first post, on Evac Prep Basics is here, and the second post, which introduces the Evac Prep Master List is here.  The third post, and the first post on the list review is here.  This post will pick up where we previously left off in reviewing the categories on the Master List. (more…)

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Book Review: The Raft by Robert Trumbull

The Raft

The plane sunk from below their feet into the depths of the deep blue abyss. Three naval airmen now find themselves floating alone in endless waves and ocean expanse. This is a gripping true story of their grueling adventure adrift at sea for 34 days in a rubber raft not much bigger than a bathtub.

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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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