Survival Tips by Clive Johnson

Survival Tips by Clive Johnson ISBN-13: 9781782749790 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Amber Books Released: April 14, 2020

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
With a total of 150 expert survival tips, Survival Tips gives you the basic skills to keep going in any situation. Tips range from using an ice axe and sheltering from the wind, to finding fresh water and building a protective shelter. Survival Tips explains how to stay safe in every environment, from the sub-zero landscape of the Arctic to the scorching suns of the tropics. Topics covered include: edible plants and animals, finding water, celestial navigation, surviving at sea, constructing shelters, hunting and trapping techniques, making fire, and more. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations.


My Review:
Survival Tips provides a series of brief tips about how to stay safe in a variety of landscapes (desert, snow, jungle, etc.) and how to deal with different emergency situations. This book is not comprehensive, not really survival training, and wasn't necessarily about unexpected emergency situations. For example, it started off with advice about what to carry in your survival kit when going hiking. The water survival tips assumed that you had been on a yacht equipped with a survival raft, so you can grab canned goods, a can opener, and water before getting into the raft. The author did have an illustration showing how to lash a raft together from wood, but a YouTube video showing these techniques in action would be more helpful and comprehensive.

The tips were generally only a few sentences long. He'd tell you how to find water, what animals and plants are edible, and what animals and plants are dangerous. However, you already have to know how to identify these plants and animals for this information to be useful. He also gave commonsense advice and advice that you probably would be given by instructors if you were going hiking in a snowy, mountainous area or visiting a desert area. He also gave some information about first aid, but much of this ended with evacuating the person to a hospital as fast as possible. Even if you had this book on hand in a survival situation, I didn't feel like the information was complete enough to help you survive. Since I learned how to do first aid, use maps, make fires, etc., in Girl Scouts and from my parents, I didn't really find much of this information useful.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.