Am I ever going to use this? [Survival Tips by Clive Johnson]

Exploring some of the world’s more remote regions can be an exciting and rewarding experience, but should things go wrong, would you know what to do? Do you possess the basics skills and, above all the determination and will to survive? With a total of 150 expert survival tips, Survival Tips gives you the basic skills to keep going in any situation, and reach safety. Tips range from using an ice axe and sheltering from the wind, to finding fresh water and building a protective shelter. Survival Tips is an easy-to-use handbook of professional survival skills. It teaches survival fundamentals for every scenario and every environment, from the sub-zero landscape of the Arctic to the scorching suns of the tropics. In clear and practical terms, the book explains how to preserve life with minimal external aids and stay safe. Topics covered include: how to make hunting weapons, identifying edible plants, survival psychology, evasion techniques, celestial navigation, surviving at sea, constructing shelters, hunting and trapping techniques, making fire, improvised cooking vessels, improvising weapons, endurance techniques and finding underground water. The book also explores traditionally less well-covered but equally essential aspects of survival such as natural remedies for common diseases, rope handling and climbing methods and unarmed combat. Illustrated with more than 100 black-and-white illustrations, Survival Tips provides the reader with a single source of invaluable survival information.

We're living in wild times right now. A pandemic! So when I read the introduction, the author's inspiring words were like a calming salve. I was primed for a fantastic read. And for the most part that's what I got. A range of dangerous scenarios were explored and life saving advice was doled out respectively. But who was that advice for? I'm unlikely to find myself in the majority of these situations so for me this was a bit specific. Routine thrill-seekers and adventurers, people who find themselves in sharp extremes of environment, or professional guides might comprise the audience that Clive Johnson's Survival Tips is most appropriate for. But for the layperson, this is just interesting information.

Really detailed instructions, many of which require foreknowledge or at least previous familiarity with the text to be applied most successfully, were specified in tips divided by most applicable disaster/scenario/emergency. The division, while logical, was not absolute because some tips referenced others in previous chapters. So the technical information often assumed familiarity with tools and terminology. I found myself on Google more than anything, looking for clarification and alternate names I was most familiar with. Sometimes learning the mechanism of action of a tip was more impactful than the tip itself (see solar still).

The one thing that I still can't get around is the relative scarcity of pictures and illustrations. 150 survival tips are included in this book. Sometimes tips are very detailed. Several tips related to animal or plant identification, but you're a bit out of luck with that here because respective pictures were severely lacking. If 20 plants are mentioned, how does an illustration of one help me? One tip referenced several types of snake. I saw those snakes and I have no idea how you'd differentiate them without color pictures, let alone just based on text descriptors. But something's better than nothing and I'd still prefer to have this book than nothing at all. 3 stars from me.

This edition of Survival Tips was to be published April 14, 2020.