I have posted about this book a couple of times on Twitter before I realized I should just write down my thoughts.

TLDR: The book of Michael Zalwski is worth a read. It does not over hype the topic and does not try to fuel fear but bring attention to topics that are realistic to prepare a plan for.

The book starts with an introduction to risk, goes into setting boundaries to fictional scenarios and goes over some realistic cases that are more likely to happen.

Part II then goes into practical tips, especially by starting with a “rainy-day find”. While that is not possible for everyone, every following topic might be even harder to achieve. The section about “Getting in shape” greatly reminds me of the movie Zombieland rule #1 “#1: Cardio – When the virus struck, for obvious reasons, the first ones to go were the fatties.”.

Because this is not the first book about the topic, the third part, while not completely new, I would still consider it a good collection of achievable things one can do and should consider and follows an order of importance, starting with water.

The last part “Active self-defense” was the least interesting for me, but again, the author put enough disclaimer to it that there might be ways to avoid situations where you e.g. would need a firearm.

You can tell that the author has not only spent considerable time researching the topic but also applied various techniques in real life. If you only want to read one book and have already read and implemented the guidelines governments usually publish to their citizens to be prepared for emergencies, this book is good from a content perspective as well as easy to read and digest and implement.

Recommendation: If you are going to buy the book, maybe buy the hardcover, you do not want your disaster plan to be dependent on an electronic device, do you?

(The link above is an Amazon partner link)

You can also read a preview chapter at: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/preview

I like it. Not too geeky, not focused on gear but concepts. The example images with the same object help to understand the differences.

— Alex (@alexanderjaeger) June 4, 2022

If it is not DNS, it is BGP. Not going to jump into the rabbit hope to understand what is going on, instead reading @lcamtuf book.

— Alex (@alexanderjaeger) December 25, 2021