Media Review: Street Smart Survival

I have been reading Street Smart Survival. Thinking that it would contain current and useful information that would be useful for urban disaster planning, I filed a special interlibrary loan request and waited for a month to get the book. I was very disappointed when I began to read it.

I found most of the general information in the book to be so basic and obvious that it was completely useless. “You should keep a first aid kit in your home.” Gee! I never would have thought of that. Thanks for your brilliant insight. “You can store emergency water supplies in plastic milk jugs.” No way! I thought they’d explode if I put anything except milk in them! (Besides, from better-researched books I’ve learned that milk jugs are a poor choice as they have a tendency to leak and their poorly sealing lids allow for contamination.)

Additionally, the author seems to hate a lot of the people who could be very useful in a crisis. Primarily, police and doctors. He thinks that police are universally afflicted with megalomania and incompetence and will actively oppose efforts to provide for ones own defense. His beef with physicians stems from the fact that he believes doctors to be money grubbing punks who will prescribe unnecessary operations solely for their own profit and will kill and maim patients through their continual carelessness. Admittedly, isolated instances of what he describes have happened but I think he paints with a very broad brush when he condemns emergency responders.

I give this poorly researched, prejudiced book * and ½ out of ***** stars. I’d advise you to avoid it unless you happen to get bored while waiting in your fall out shelter during World War III (I which case survival books are probably too late anyways.).