Book Review: Your Survival: The Complete Resource for Disaster Planning and Recovery

RealisticPreparedness.com Book Review

Your Survival: The Complete Resource for Disaster Planning and Recovery

by: Bob Arnot and Mark Cohen

Summary:

The Your Survival book and DVD set provides a good overview of natural disaster preparedness for people who are not sure that they need to be prepared. The set includes a 90 minute DVD and a 160 page spiral bound manual in a hard cover.

Sources:

The authors seem to have put a good bit of time into researching their information by consulting with a a variety of government officials and disaster survivors.

Depth:

This book does a good job convincing the reader that they need to prepare for natural disasters, no matter where they live in the United States. Both resources are broken into three sections, covering things to think about before, during and after a disaster. However, in an effort to simplify preparedness, they do not go into much detail. Food gets covered in two pages and one of them is a sample shopping list. The same is true for first aid kits. There is limited information provided on what to do with the supplies that your purchase. However, the third section on how to deal with insurance companies, contractors and rebuilding is more thorough. There is a link to the author’s related website, but the information provided there is largely the same as what is offered in the book.

Overall:

 This set has some excellent maps and graphs that clearly illustrate the need for all Americans to be prepared for various natural disasters. The information provided is well thought out, researched and organized. The author provides a very simple, generic plan for basic preparedness.

  The information provided in this book is very limited in some important areas. The majority of the book deals with natural disasters, while terrorism and biological concerns are just briefly mentioned. This book should really be thought of as an overview, with the hope that the reader will do more research on their own into key topics.