Book Review – The Prepper’s Survival Guide

There are few books that provide the detail I look for regarding prepping and survival. Bryan Foster, aka Zion Prepper, has provided that detail with his latest book, The Prepper’s Survival Guide: An Introduction to Prepping and a Guide to FIRE. This book is definitely worth the purchase.

Why? You may ask. For starters, the first 40 pages focuses strictly on prepping and provide information around the Five Tenets of Prepping including the Survival Triangle©. Bryan starts by going into depth on the differences between prepping and self-reliance. After focusing on the Ten Commandments of Prepping, the drill down into the Five Tenets provides a new look at survival overall.

Although we deal with the Survival Triangle© to some degree on a day-to-day basis, the broadened spectrum of it, along with Physical and Mental Well-Being, Redundancy, Forming a Community, and Silence brings an eye opening view into things I was aware of but hadn’t looked at it through the eyes of a different prepper. Bryan’s view was a good thing and alone is worth the price of the book.

However, as Billy Mays used to say, “but wait, there’s more”.

For approximately 140 more pages, Mr. Foster explains Fire. You may think that to be a boring read and why would any author go into detail for 140 pages? Regardless of your thoughts, this is where I found some very valuable “meat”.

I have followed many of the suggestions in this book when building fires, fire starters and various other methods for cooking or heat. In the pages though, Zion Prepper goes into detail on not just how to make your own fire starters, but he also has a section on how to make your own stoves. And not just how to make them one way but for both subjects, there are detailed pages and pages of instructions on many different methods, when to use them and even why you would use them in certain circumstances.

The instructions, by the way, vary from the simplistic to the advanced. Don’t let the word advanced scare you off though. I use the word advanced for those that already know how to use a match or ferro rod and want to learn another method for starting a fire in order to have variety in different situations.

You can read the table of contents yourself by clicking on the picture at the beginning, but he does delve into things such as site selection, fuels, structures, ignition sources, starting the fire, signaling and even entertaining fires.

I will say in reading this book, which is now a permanent part of my prepping and survival library, one little nugget that is not in the Table of Contents that I was overly impressed with was how to make a Fire Piston. I have always been intrigued on fires started by this method and Bryan Foster compiled information from Tom Lourens into the details needed on how to actually make your own fire piston with low cost materials. This is another one of those things that is well worth the cost of the book alone.

The Facts:

• $8.99 on Amazon.com in paperback (not available for Kindle)
• 206 pages

I can’t make you read it but I can certainly recommend you purchase it. Add this book to your library, make sure you read it and even try some of the projects. I definitely look forward to Bryan Foster’s next book in the Prepper’s Survival Guide Series.

Until then,

Use your instincts to survive