Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

About the fake reviews part, I found that out after posting my original review. It appears that the author is posting some of the 5 star reviews for this book. See my comments in response to the author below for more info on that. Also, it looks like the author is using his multiple accounts to mark this review as "not helpful" so it won't show up to other people. If you found it helpful, please consider marking it as "helpful" so he can't silence this. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Original review: I bought this book after seeing that it had a four star review. I figured it must be decent or it wouldn't have four stars. Boy was I wrong. After having read this book and looking at the reviews again, it's apparent that the people leaving these reviews are pretty inexperienced in this field and don't know enough to detect that the author is lacking some qualifications to write a book like this. Here are a couple glaring errors that on their own led me to question the rest of what's written in the book: 1) The book says to invest a few thousand dollars into good quality optics for your rifle, and purchase a Gen III auto-gated PVS-14 night vision monocle. He then tells you to mount the PVS-14 IN FRONT OF the rifle scope. He even includes a photo of what is presumably his AR-15 with a PVS-14 mounted in front of what looks like a high power scope. The level of fail here is just astounding. A PVS-14 is always mounted behind your optic, especially a high powered scope! 2) A few pages are spent on the subject of climbing. The author recommends using 400 to 600 pound test fishing line or paracord. He says you can use a larger fishing hook as a "grappling hook". The best part is this quote: "Secure your rope to the grappling hook. Anyone who has secured a fishing knot knows how to do this. If you are not a fisherman, any knot that is secure will do the trick." So what's wrong with this you ask? Well, the average adult male with rifle, body armor, etc weighs something close to 200 lbs. Paracord is supposed to have a breaking strength of 550 pounds, but the commercial stuff available all over the place is often weaker. The author says secure the rope with "any secure knot". Some knots decrease the rated capacity of a line by over 50%. So now we are left with a breaking strength of about 250 pounds. Even the slightest shock from a 200 lb person decelerating using this rope would cause it to fail. The thought of using a fishing line for this is even stupider. 3) Not in the book, but on the author's website he claims that level his IIIa soft body armor will stop a .308 round. That's completely false, IIIa armor will only stop pistol caliber rounds. Again, makes you question the validity of anything he says. From his website: "Body Armor - Point Blank IIIA Less than 4 lbs. Will stop a .308 round (under some circumstances). Breaths well. Not combat armor, but good for survival." There's a whole bunch of other stuff like this in the book and a lot of grammatical errors, but I don't want to spend an hour listing it all. He lost me after the night vision thing. Instead of reading this, you would be better off finding a better manual written by an legitimate expert on SERE. If you want to read something about tactics to defend yourself in a SHTF situation, I just got finished reading Contact! by Max Velocity and learned a good bit from it. I'm going to try and return this book to Amazon and order something else that I hopefully learn some new skills from.