Emergency by Neil Strauss

Neil Strauss has been prepar­ing him­self for emer­gen­cies for the last three years, but not for ordi­nary emer­gen­cies like black­outs or los­ing a job. It’s The End of the World As We Know It stuff that Strauss is con­cerned about – known by the acronym TEOTWAWKI in the book – the col­lapse of the sys­tem and civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.

If you find his name famil­iar, here’s why: Neil Strauss is the author of the best-selling book The Game: Pen­e­trat­ing the Secret Soci­ety of Pickup Artists. In The Game, he reveals how he turned from a lonely and clue­less music critic into one of the most famous pick-up artists in the world.

In Emer­gency: This Book Will Save Your Life, Strauss writes about how he slowly loses his faith in the sys­tem, and deter­mines to learn how to sur­vive out­side of it. He trans­forms from an every­day city-boy into a wilder­ness sur­vivor who shoots, tracks, hunts, lives in the wild with noth­ing but a knife and the clothes on his back, picks locks, hot-wires cars, evades bounty hunters and escapes across the border.

Emergency’s 5 Acts

The book is divided into five parts; Ori­en­ta­tion, Five Steps, Escape, Sur­vive, Res­cue. Ori­en­ta­tion is a short intro­duc­tion. Five Steps tells the story of how Strauss saw through the cracks of mod­ern civ­i­liza­tion, and why he decides to learn how to sur­vive on his own in case The Shit Hits the Fan (TSHTF for short).

Escape is about Strauss’s quest for a sec­ond cit­i­zen­ship in case he ever needs to bail from the US. In Sur­vive he real­izes that it’s not enough just to be able to escape, he needs to learn how to take care of him­self wher­ever he is. This is the coolest part in the book where Strauss describes learn­ing tac­ti­cal shoot­ing from Gun­site, track­ing from Tom Brown Jr.‘s Tracker School and knives from a hard­core knife spe­cial­ist named Mad Dog. And Res­cue is the con­clud­ing, about-turn in the story where he vol­un­teers in local res­cue oper­a­tions to get used to TSHTF sit­u­a­tions, and gains more from the process than he expected.

Is Neil Strauss Crazy?

I’ve always been a lit­tle para­noid, so a book about prepar­ing for TEOTWAWKI is prob­a­bly not the best book for my nerves. There were parts in the book that sounded really cool, like Strauss’s lessons in gun com­bat. And there were parts when I thought he was going over the edge, like con­duct­ing a self-imposed 3-day black­out to test his emer­gency preparations.

But as I read the book, I started to won­der if the fail­ure of the sys­tem he talks is so far-fetched after all. Espe­cially after recently read­ing in the same span of time about Ice­land going bank­rupt, Argentina descend­ing into urban chaos, and the daily pes­simism with the cur­rent recession.

Are the sys­tems we trust to keep soci­ety as we know it going, fail-proof after all? And if they’re not, isn’t it bet­ter to be pre­pared for worst case sce­nar­ios than be caught flat-footed?

Is Emer­gency worth Reading?

Emer­gency: This Book Will Save Your Life is not a straight how-to book with exact steps and tech­niques, but wraps a gen­eral intro­duc­tion to the survivalist’s world in an enter­tain­ing per­sonal jour­ney. Some of the ideas in the book will be out of reach for most, like fork­ing out half a mil­lion dol­lars for a 2nd pass­port and get­ting firearms train­ing (per­sonal firearms are ille­gal in my coun­try). The book’s nar­ra­tive flow feels clunky in parts, and Strauss’s final trans­for­ma­tion from fear to power in the end doesn’t feel quite complete.

But I thor­oughly enjoyed read­ing Emer­gency; Strauss’s writ­ing is per­sonal, philo­soph­i­cal and fun. He’s not afraid to be hon­est and show the times he falls in his quest to be a bet­ter per­son, and that helps me relate to him – a fel­low city-dweller who’s also a stranger to the survivalist’s world.

There are two kinds of books in the world: the kind you read, think ‘how inter­est­ing’, then put down and go back to liv­ing the way you did before. Then there’s the rarer kind of book, the kind you read, think ‘how inter­est­ing’, then put down and you don’t live life quite the same way again. Emer­gency falls in the rarer cat­e­gory, and it’s already inspired a list of to-do things to pre­pare myself for emer­gen­cies that will prob­a­bly make the peo­ple around me think I’ve gone crazy. But after read­ing it, I don’t look at the world the same way again and it’s worth read­ing if just for that alone.