Shaykitteh's World of Books

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

This book is a collection of true stories of disasters that people survived (or didn't) as well as survival advise in case you are caught in a disaster of any type. In between stories, it explains how to keep a cool head and use local resources. This isn't your typical "You should pack these items if you want to survive" book because it assumes that you can't plan for a disaster or emergency. Most people don't have an emergency pack that they carry with them everywhere, so a guide that helps you deal with the struggle of keeping your spirits up and possibly being a leader to help get your group to safety is more useful than most generic disaster books.

The one thing that I did not care for in this book is how they handled telling the four main stories of survival. Instead of sharing one story, and then the next, etc., the book will tell a few pages or a few paragraphs of the story before giving me an annoying arrow with text telling me that if I want to know the next installment of the story I should go to . Therefore, if I wanted to read the story in whole, I had to skip through the entire book following the page numbers, and then go back to the beginning to do the same thing with the next three stories. Plus then I would have to go back to read all of the other disaster information contained in the book. While I understand why the author wanted to split up the chapters they way they were done, splitting up the stories was just an annoyance for me... it reminded me of the "Choose your own adventure" stories from when I was a kid, and you would have to thread your way through the book to your particular end, skipping over other parts of the book.  Or you could just read the book straight through and try to keep the story-lines separated in your head, which is what I ended up having to do with this book.

For the stories themselves and the useful disaster information, this book would get 4 stars from me. However, the aggravation of "Turn in next chapter to find out if this person lived or died" annoyed me enough that I lowered this score down to a 3. Combining the two of them, I decided to give this book a 3 1/2 on the sites that allow me to give half stars, and 3 stars on sites that only allow 3 stars. My advice to the author is to keep stories together instead of splitting them up.... you still could have had your chapters that way you did, but you could have included one story per chapter and just picked the story that fit that chapter theme the best.

NOTE: If you enjoyed my review, I would appreciate if you could mark it as being helpful on Amazon as well.  I have included the link to the Amazon review in the Source section at the bottom of this review.