Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One of my Soldiers brought this book out to the field during a 45-day field problem, and all the guys read this during our down time. We all still make fun of this one and it gave us a lot of inside jokes. Why one star? I don't care what anyone says, this manuscript never went to a real editor. The grammar/spelling is good, but any real editor would have red-lined 60% of the stuff in this book. Anything that can be said in 11 words, this author says it in 110 words. He will describe every...single....little....detail...of everything he does. It totally takes away from the plot. Like a whole page on tying up a clothesline, or a whole page on boiling a cup of water. (I'm not exaggerating)The list goes on. One star because the author insists on listing the exact brand, model number, and nomenclature of every possible item in the book. Nothing can ever be just a knife....it has to be what it is listed as in a Cabela's catalog. Nobody ever holsters a pistol.....instead they holster their Springfield XD .45 in their Uncle Mike's Nylon IWB holster then a paragraph about hot it is worn. This book is kinda like reading an outdoor outfitter catalog. Everybody in the book is either totally evil or totally good. No gray area. Everybody in the book is either totally prepared for WWIII or absolutely unprepared to survive one week. There is no middle. And the food! The protagonist starts off with half a case of MRE's. The first 35 pages literally mentions MRE's 35 times (I counted). Every time the protagonist encounters a good guy, he is invited to huge Thanksgiving Day size meals to celebrate stuff like killing the bad neighbor next door or whatever. Not kidding. For a book about survival, the protagonist sure never goes hungry at all or needs to look for any food (while all the bad guys are starving wretches) because at every other page he gets fed or cooks a big MRE meal before going to bed. (We counted....this dude ate more on his walk than we did in the field! lol) And the luck. There is never any conflict really....every time the protagonist looks like finally he will have it hard or there may be some interesting conflict.......he gets incredibly lucky. It's boring because the good guy has it easier than most people do on a bad day at work. The going home is even boring because he constantly reminds us that his family is safe and has plenty to survive indefinitely and they are surrounded by neighbors who will look out for them. Luckily enough the guy next door just got home from Afghanistan that very week and will also watch out for them. Yay! So much suspense. Where is the urgency to get home? There really is none. It kinda starts to get a plot about the government causing the disaster....but it is so far out tinfoil hat stuff that it detracts from its own plot. Walking 230 miles with a 60 lbs bag? Ok you have fun buddy. When I was a young Soldier conditioned to walk 25 miles in a night, or 100 miles in 4 days, we kept our bags down to 35lbs. No way in hell I'd try to carry 60 lbs 230 miles even when I was a young infantryman almost in Olympic class conditioning. There is no survival advice in this book. The guy is carrying 3 sleep systems and 2 cooking systems. He said he looked for non-essential gear to toss, but only tossed away a couple wrenches. 230 miles? No way dude! All my Soldiers agreed we could get that monstrous ridiculous bag down to around 20 lbs and be just as comfortable. I mean, it is winter in Florida! Even that is a huge stroke of luck! The extra clothes and shoes and the ghillie suit and ridiculous grill and all that silly stuff would be in the ditch. The author is a guy that is writing about things he has no idea about. He is so addicted to his gadgets he would die of panic if he were ever separated from his stuff. Any pros? The author does make an effort to have good ethics overall. Unlike some other authors in this genre, he writes in a voice that does not glorify unnecessarily harming people during a very bad situation. For that, I tip my hat. But he is just naive in general about writing and survival.