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.