I have read and studied a lot of survival manuals. One significant trouble with the genre is that the trouble you’re in never seems to match up with the situations the books aim to prepare you for.
Some survival books focus on outdoor survival under impossible circumstances. Personally, I have no plans to put myself into a situation where I might find myself buck naked on an ice flow in the Antarctic or walking across the Gobi desert with nothing to hold water except the remnants of an automobile tire. Those situations seem pretty easy to avoid.
Other survival books provide impossible solutions. I don’t have a ranch with it’s own water supply and I don’t see myself acquiring one in the near future. Most people can’t and don’t — because most people have families and day jobs and limited resources.
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre’s book, The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse, is about a survival scenario that we as individuals cannot easily avoid becoming a part of. We can avoid the Antarctic and the Gobi Desert, but economic failures in the nations where we work and live are beyond our effective control. Worse, at the time of this writing it appears that the United States is sliding uncontrollably towards an eventual economic collapse of a magnitude not seen since FDR was in office. These factors make this book both relevant and timely.
Fernando was not a survival expert and did not intend to become one. Unfortunately for him he lived in Argentina in 2001, when incompetent socialists drove the previously prosperous nation into a decline sharper and deeper than the American Great Depression. This gave Fernando ample opportunities to sharpen his survival skills.
This book is a compilation of what Mr. Aguirre learned during the collapse, and is a very useful guidebook for Americans — who may be headed into a similar collapse. It’s full of common sense advice for living like a human being under extremely suboptimal conditions. Unlike many survival books, it contains almost no theory or what-if scenarios. It’s all about what really happened in middle-class Argentina.
The book is written very informally. It’s not full of formulas for determining the safe storage of grain or guides on how to tell which mushrooms are edible. It does, however, contain some very solid advice on dealing with everyday life during a period of significant need. This includes advice on maintaining clean water supplies, safe grocery shopping, recommended dog breeds, safe driving under threatening conditions, doing business and making money after the fall, and dealing with fellow citizens whose moral sense may be more than a bit dulled by their hunger sense.
The book is only $24.95 at Amazon and it is well worth the price. You can also read more from Fernando at his blog, Surviving in Argentina. You can even follow Fernando on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.
