Good Books To Read BEFORE The World Ends

When the world is ending you'd better be ready to bring it like MacGyver.

The scenario really doesn't matter, but if you're planning on outlasting the decline and fall of civilization you're going to need to know a few things. Can you tan a hide? Make a bow and arrow? How about flint knapping? Can you do that? No. Well, let's fix that.

If we take Cormac McCarthy's word for it (The Road), mankind will devolve into a race of filthy flesh-eating monsters within mere months of the world's demise. So as water, food and ammunition begins to grow scarce you will need to be able to make things, catch things, find things and generally wax John Rambo in order to survive.

So start doing some push-ups, don a tattered red head band and tie a jade Buddha around your neck. It's time to get self-reliant.


When Technology Fails: A Manual For Self-Reliance & Planetary Survival by Matthew Stein. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River Junction, Vermont. Folio Paperback. ISBN: 9781933392837. $30. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

To say Stein's book is impressive is to describe Niagra Falls as misty. A mechanical engineer with a degree from MIT, Stein has written the book on self-sufficiency. The book is unbelievable packed with information, so much so, that I am certain that owning a copy of it places you on a FBI list of some sort.

Contents

I. An Introduction To Self-Reliance
II. Present Trends, Possible Futures
III. Supplies & Preparation
IV. Emergency Measures For Survival
V. Water
VI. Food: Growing, Foraging, Hunting & Storing
VII. Shelter & Buildings
VIII. First Aid
IX. Low-Tech Medicine & Healing
X. Clothing & Textiles
XI. Energy, Heat & Power
XII. Metalworking
XIII. Utensils & Storage
XIV. Better Living Through Low-Tech Chemistry
XV. Engineering, Machines & Materials

Seriously. From fletchery to canning, with the production of a solar-power device capping it off, Stein's book is singularly full. Every section begins with an introduction and finishes with suggested further reading and a list of resources for project completion. It could be a company that makes inexpensive collapsible homes or a book that outlines additional sturctures that can be raised from natural goods. The book is simply amazing.

I am not a paranoid, let that be said. I am not someone who even believes that food and oil issues will unwind society. I am also curious enough to want to investigate questions of our modern lack of self-reliance. As a society we are thoroughly dependent on finished products and this is so much so that we often have no idea what goes into the making of these products. Whether the genetic foodstuffs of Monsanto or the components of a flashlight, we are embarrassingly unaware.

Stein's book isn't just a manual of production techniques and useful knowledge. In his sections on cataclysmic possibilities and environmental responsibility we find a comment on what can be done more so than what hasn't been done.

Too much of this sort of writing is composed of a grizzled environmentalist crowing "I told you so" and generally longing for some catastrophe to prove their life's work worth while.

In any case, if you want to become a person capable of transforming yourself into a hybrid hero combining MacGyver and Daniel Boone, well, this is your book.


Food In History by Reay Tannahill. Three Rivers Press. New York. History. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 0517884046. $16.95. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

It's amazing when a lay person writes the book that redefines how a historical view is formed. Reay Tannahill's Food In History is perhaps the most singular example of such a work. First published in 1973 and revised in 1988, the book is both well-researched and creative.

When living in the later stages of the end times we have surely arrived at a total return to subsistence culture. Perhaps all semblances of high society are gone. In its place we find ourselves roving tribes, hunting and gathering just like the first humans. You however are the keeper of the light, as you've read Stein's book as well as Tannahill.

Instantly you recognize the germinating seeds of meals past sprouting out of last season's trash. You tell the ragged others to dig these plants up and plant them in cleaner areas, with more space and light. Soon you are eating squash, corn or whatever the local flora might be. Naturally you are the leader or your tribe and on a wind-swept heath you look out over the plains full of hoofed mammals and formulate plans on rebuilding society. Good thing you read the Devil's Accountant.

Kidding aside, the story of man's relationship with food is fascinating. Luck, skill and random observations about food prove to be the fulcrum for man's lifting of society from nomadic subsistence to cultured order. Tannahill poses many theories about the transition, many of them founded in primary research and others coaxed forward by clever hypothesis.

Food In History is more than a end of days book, of course. Foodies and history buggs will delight in reading about the transition of subsistence gathering to celebratory feasts. Food, like the cultures it fueled, became something to relish, season and enjoy.

One interesting aspect to this book is how it relates to different people with varying levels of interest in food. For the average American it will call to attention how perverse fast food gluttony is. It will also force health conscious food activists to realize that the vegetable driven world of settled culture both diminished and created man. With the advent of farming we grew smaller and weaker. Not necessarily because of some retardation of Darwinian principles but because of the rise of lower protein diets. Bread and butter a strong man does not make.

At the same time, the rise of agrarian culture allowed man to have something we did not have as hunter gatherers. Time. Art, religion, science and nearly every other "knowledge" that we define ourselves by today was born of the free time that farming allowed. Populations grew. With fences and better tools we once and for all rose above the beasts.


The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Oxford's World Classics. Fiction. Trade paperback. ISBN: 9780199553976. $7.95. Click the book cover above to purchase a copy and support the Devil's Accountant.

Undoubtedly you are going to need to understand the mindset of survivalism. Coupled with the notion that you might end up being the last person on earth, which is often the case, you will also need to understand the burden of solitude.

Enter plucky British reserve and can-do-it attitude. Spending nearly thirty years on a desert island, the majority of which alone, Robinson Crusoe not only maintains his sanity but creates a sort of society of one.

Robinson Crusoe is of course a classic. Published in 1719 it is one of the first English novels and in many ways one of the earliest pieces of fictional long prose. While there may be much to glean from its pages from a standpoint of survival skills, the book's clear didactic moment is found in its treatment of the psychology of survivalism. Or, as James Joyce observed, it's psychology of conquest. Survival and conquest are closely related, and the perfect mindset for either is not one you're going to find agreeable.

"He is the true prototype of the British colonist. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence, the unconscious cruelty, the persistence, the slow yet efficient intelligence, the sexual apathy, the calculating taciturnity."
-James Joyce, Daniel Defoe

The apathy may be your only way to stave off insanity. It is a grim existence, the role of last person on Earth. You will have to become an asexual god-being, capable of lording over the land and beasts with cruel efficiency. If you should encounter another you will need to either subjugate or ally with great expedience.

You laugh. But when it's you versus me in a fight to the death over the last chicken wing, you had better have your head on straight because I'm bringing the heat.

This is going to be a fun month. Next week's post will be on different conceptions of life after the flood, so to speak. Zombies and bombs included.