Come Back Alive is an amusing collection of anecdotes and almost assuredly useless advice regarding travel security.  It’s a good light read for the outbound leg of a vacation flight. This isn’t a serious survival book.  Much of the advice is either so obvious as to be silly, so obscure as to be useless, or just plain wrong.  On the other hand, the trivia is interested and is presented with a witty writing style. A few excerpts from the book: “Hurricanes spin counter clockwise in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern hemisphere, where they are typically called cyclones.” [...]

How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It is one of the better survival books on the market.  It is focused specifically on major disasters and does not cover related topics such as defense against “normal” crime or travel security.  This focus allows it to provide  more in-depth coverage of it’s narrow field. Despite being only 307 pages, this book is actually quite hard to read.  It’s not that the book is poorly written written, it is only that the book is so filled with hard facts that you will be taking notes, underlining passages, doing [...]

When All Hell Breaks Loose covers much of the same ground as How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, but it is a significantly different book. This book is much longer, yet easier to read.  It’s layout and graphics are far more professionally done.  On the flip side, the information provided is a much lower quality.  The author babbles endless platitudes and spends more time displaying his attitude than focusing on the topic at hand. On the positive side, this book is extremely focused on survival strategies you can implement with very little or no [...]

Surviving the Economic Collapse has one seriously important advantage over almost all other disaster preparedness books — the author has really lived through the disaster he writes about.  Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre was a young man in Argentina when the socialist government’s tax and spend policies caused a drastic devaluation of the peso and a contraction of the economy so severe that is led to social collapse.  In the last 42 years the Argentinian government has dropped thirteen zeros from the value of a peso.  One 2011 peso is the equivalent of ten trillion 1969 pesos. This is inflation far surpassing [...]