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Wilderness Survival By Gregory J. Davenport. This is the book I recommend for basic wilderness survival skills (of the type discussed on this page), rather than wilderness living skills (such as you would want for a long-term stay in the wilderness). It's also nice that it's one of the few non-Australian survival books that doesn't have a plants chapter with a whole lot of plants that we don't have in the Australian wilderness.

With concise explanations (that is, he does not fill out the text much with stories and other non-essential information) and detailed illustrations, survival expert Gregory Davenport covers the five basic elements of survival - personal protection, signalling, finding food and water, travel, and health — providing the reader with complete information on how to stay calm and alive until rescue arrives.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Climates of the Globe; Weather; Gear; Survival and Medical Kits; Pre-departure Survival Plan; Three Steps to Wilderness Survival; Health; Personal Protection; Sustenance; Signalling; Travel and Negotiation; Improvising; Children and Survival; Index.

Reviews

"A must-read for anyone who goes outdoors. Informative and captivating. It covers the principles of survival better than any book I have read..." — Captain Scott O'Grady, Survivor, Bosnia.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $29.49 AUD

Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature and Survival for Children, Tom Brown Jr. with Judy Brown. This is Tom Brown's field guide intended for older children, or (mainly) for parents to read and teach to their children. It contains the basics of some of Tom's other field guides (most notably "Wilderness Survival" and "Nature Observation and Tracking") so it can also be used by anyone who wants to learn the basics without having to purchase several guides.

Since Tom's books tend to be on the side of too much information rather than not enough, just the "basics" in his eyes actually makes up a huge amount of information. With 220 pages of small writing it's not exactly written for five year-olds. Which makes this book an extremely good (I think one of the best) all-round wilderness survival books to learn from, even for adults.

I would go as far as to say that this is the best all-round book to get if you are the type of person that won't find a purely technical book very interesting or inspiring. If you want to go into more depth with any of the topics covered, you can always do that but this book gives a really good grounding in all of the basics. I like Tom's philosophy and I find that it makes the book much more interesting than the purely technical books such as Davenport and the US Army Survival Manual. I love the chapter called "Society of Robots" where he writes about getting children out into the wilderness as the antidote to the boredom and dissillusionment that is such a massive part of modern life.

It's also nice that it's one of the few non-Australian survival books that doesn't have a plants chapter with a whole lot of plants that we don't have in the Australian wilderness.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $22.99 AUD

Collins Gem SAS Survival Guide, John 'Lofty' Wiseman. The great advantage of this guide is that it is very much a pocket survival guide. The book is tiny, 11.5 cm by 8 cm and 2.5 cm thick. For such a small book it has a huge amount of information in its 384 pages. That means the writing is very small. It is great to pack into places that you might not take a larger book. It is also quite cheap so there is no excuse not to have one of these if you are interested in survival information. The author John 'Lofty' Wiseman served in the SAS for 26 years so he knows his stuff. The plants section contains northern hemishpere plants (it's published in the United Kingdom).

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $11.99 AUD

Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival, Tom Brown Jr. This is the classic survival skills manual from one of the world's most famous wilderness survival instructors, Tom Brown Jr. He runs what is probably the world's largest and best known wilderness survival and living skills school in the USA, which is sometimes booked out for a couple of years ahead.

The book, like all of Tom's books, contains a lot of his philosophy, which I think makes the book much more interesting and valuable than the more purely technical books. Most of the plants are relevant to North America, though some of them are also found in Australia (many of them as introduced weeds).

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $23.99 AUD

US Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76, Illustrated. Department of Defense, United States Army. This is the basic survival field manual used by the US Army for survival training. It contains a huge amount of useful information, written in a fairly mechanical style. It's a good solid survival book, one of those classic books that keeps getting reprinted every few years. The version I have is dated october 1957 (though the printing is much more recent than that) and has a different cover to the picture I have shown here. It has the same number of pages (288) though and is almost certainly the same book. There is another book also titled FM 21-76 which is about Survival, Evasion, and Recovery" which is only 104 pages, that I haven't seen.

Click here to purchase from Australia (soft cover) $22.99 AUD

Click here to purchase from Australia (hard cover) $35.49 AUD

Tom Brown's Field Guide to City and Suburban Survival, Tom Brown Jr. This is the survival guide for city and suburban environments. A nice feature is that almost all of the plants in the plants section are also found in Australia in city and suburban landscapes. If you think you might ever be stuck in a city or suburb when things start to run out (like food, electricity, water, or law enforcement), this is your book.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $22.99 AUD

Participating in Nature: Wilderness Survival and Primitive Living Skills Thomas J. Elpel. This and the Ultimate Guide (below) would be the best two general wilderness living books that I have seen (and I have seen lots). While there is some treatment of emergency-style survival skills, the focus is on long-term living using (mostly) only what is provided by nature. This book is more nicely set out than the Ultimate Guide, and more interesting to read bits from.

Click here to purchase from Australia $38.99 AUD

Wilderness Living By Gregory J. Davenport. This is the next step up from Greg Davenport's "Wilderness Survival" survival skills book (discussed earlier on this page). Rather than focusing on the bare survival essentials you will need to get through a short-term stay away from civilisation, it is about longer-term wilderness living skills (such as you would want for a long-term stay in the wilderness).

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $26.99 AUD

Australian Bushcraft, Richard Graves. (Out of Print). This is the new version of his "10 bushcraft books" about wilderness survival and wilderness living skills. The original version is long out of print but has been made available online here by Christopher Molloy. From his website: "The 10 Bushcraft Books are the seminal texts on bushcraft.... As far as is known, The 10 Bushcraft Books are unique. There is nothing quite like them, nor is any collection of bushcraft knowledge under one cover as comprehensive." A classic. Out of print as far as I know and expensive secondhand (I paid about AU$60 for mine, which was okay, but I have seen them for a lot more than that.

Kamana One by Jon Young, Wilderness Awareness School. The Kamana program by Wilderness Awareness School (North American) is an awesome correspondence course teaching wilderness and native skills and awareness.

The focus is more on native awareness and on learning your local environment (the plants and animals) than on specific survival skills. With this course, it takes a long time before you knew a lot of actual practical skills — but by the time you do, your level of knowledge has become very, very deep and broad. The skills you will learn in Kamana are the foundations for being completely at home in the wilderness in a way that you could never achieve by quickly cramming some practical/technical survival skills. So it is ideal for people who are interested in survival skills as a long-term committment to learning an entire way of life.

It is also ideal for people who are not so interested in wilderness "survival" as such, but want to learn to appreciate and feel more at home in nature. Wilderness Awareness School has a policy of teaching absolutely no (what they call) "survivalist doom and gloom". Everything they offer is required to be 100% positive and inspiring, and they definitely live up to that.

Click here to purchase from Wilderness Awareness School (USA) $24.95 USD

Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living: Surviving with Nothing But Your Bare Hands and What You Find in the Woods, John & Geri McPherson.

In-depth instructions and step-by-step photos of real survival skills--exactly what one needs to stay alive in the woods. The book first covers immediate needs like starting a fire, erecting temporary shelter, and finding food. Then it goes beyond other survival books by explaining advanced techniques for long-term living in the wild -- using only those things found in nature. The authors show how to make tools by chipping stones, fashion a bow-and-arrow out of tree branches, weave baskets, fire primitive pots, build a semi-permanent shelter, and even tan hides. Finally, the authors explain how to bring all these skills together to live in the wilderness for days, weeks, months, or even years.

Click here to purchase from Australia $31.49 AUD

Naked Into the Wilderness - Primitive Wilderness Living & Survival Skills, John & Geri McPherson.

I chose Naked Into the Wilderness on the basis of its detailed and very practical descriptions of the most important wilderness survival skills.

It is not a "pretty" book, the illustrations are generally much too dark, and the text is kind of "rough". It is not the most inspiring book in terms of romantic descriptions of a sacred, magical wilderness survival life (if you want that, Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival would be a better choice). It is also not a book that contains the absolute basics of wildnerness survival, such as that you can die in three minutes without air, three hours without adequate protection from the cold and wet, three days without water, and three weeks without food. I would (and will, when I get around to it) recommend other books for that kind of information.

NEW: There is a new version of this important wilderness survival book (listed above as "Ultimate Guide to Wilderness Living"). If you have this book already, don't get the new one since its almost the same content. If you don't have it yet, the new one would be the one to get.

Primitive Wilderness Skills, Applied & Advanced (“Naked Into the Wilderness 2”), by John and Geri McPherson

The second volume is currently (at the time of writing this) out of print. I have placed a link to it at Amazon.com on the right of this page, where you can see the best available second hand price for it. If you can find it at a similar price to what it was worth new (about $25USD), it would definitely be worth getting, (although I would recommend other books ahead of it as a third essential book to get).

Emergency - This Book Will Save Your Life, Neil Strauss.

Terrorist attacks. Natural disasters. Domestic crackdowns. Economic collapse. Riots. Wars. Disease. Starvation. What can you do when it all hits the fan? You can learn to be self-sufficient and survive without the system.

This is more of an "entertainment" style book than most of the other books on this site, and one of the few that I do not own. It is a good read, though, and recommended if you are looking for a story that is interesting and easy to keep reading to see what happens next.

Click here to purchase from Australia $31.49 AUD

Primitive Technology: A Book of Earth Skills, David Wescott (editor).

Awesome book. From a reader's review, “This is, in my humble opinion, the BEST single source for primitive skills out there — PERIOD. If you've ever looked through a scientific journal or periodical, that is the basic layout for this book: a compendium of articles, each one detailing a different tool, task, method, or application of a primitive skill. It isn't a high-cut book you need a PhD to understand. You can take this out in the backyard and follow right along, and succeed!” I would agree completely.

Click here to purchase from Australia $36.99 AUD
Purchase Wilderness Awareness School (USA) US$24.95

Primitive Technology II: Ancestral Skills - From the Society of Primitive Technology, David Wescott (editor).

Primitive Technology II: Ancestral Skills provides the guide to rediscovery of the skills and crafts that bind us all into this great human family. Contents: Food Sources, Containers, Projectiles, Buckskin, Transportation Back to Basics. A continuation of the book Primitive Technology, what has been called “the best single source for primitive skills out there — PERIOD.”

Click here to purchase from Australia $37.99 AUD

The Way of the Scout: A Native American Path to Finding Spiritual Meaning in a Physical World, Tom Brown Jr.

This can be a greatly inspiring book, if read in the correct way. Much of it appears to be at the least greatly exaggerated. However Tom Brown Jr does really know how to do these types of skills, and he must have learned them from somewhere. If you are not too concerned with strict accuracy, this is a great book. It is like Tom's other books — only even more so.

Click here to purchase from Australia $11.49 AUD

Survival Skills of Native Califofnia, Paul Campbell. If survival books were ranked by how much they weigh, this would easily be either the best (or the worst) book in my collection. Weighing in at 1.1 kilograms, it is a huge book containing lots of information. Despite the title it is much more of a wilderness living book than a survival skills book in the way that most people think of survival skills. It's similar in style to the Wescott "Primitive Technology" books I have described above (apart from this one all being written by the one same person). If you are serious about learning how to live long-term without modern technology, don't even think — just get this one.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $60.49 AUD

Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects, Faith D'Aluisio and Peter Menzel. This is the book to get to shock your friends that are afraid of spiders. The cover has a very memorable photo of a girl eating large black spiders on what looks like a satay stick without the satay sauce. Yum! Would you like flies with that?

Insects and seaweed are possibly the two most under-utilised food sources in the world today, and they will both become important when the output of our fossil-fuel-produced food systems starts to decline. This book has lots of colour photos and small writing, which makes it both interesting to flick through and informative as well. It's written from the perspective of countries where they talk about how people with more body fat are fitter and have more endurance.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $43.49 AUD

Exploring the Outdoors with Indian Secrets, Allan A. Macfarlan. This book should really be called "Indian Hunting Secrets", since that is what it is about. It's excellent. It's about bowhunting, deer hunting, how to catch predators like coyotes and foxes, how to get close to big game (like bears and mooses), how to track animals and outguess their moves, how to become invisible (like camofluague and blinds), and how to outwit small game.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $23.49 AUD

Practicing Primitive: A Handbook of Aboriginal Skills, Steven M. Watts. This book is similar to the "Primitive Techbology" books edited by David Wescott. It contains a bit less information overall, but more drawings, it has larger writing and is easier to read. It's a good one for the collection if you already have the Primitive Technology books and/or Paul Campbell's book (see above on this page) but I would rank these other books ahead of it.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $37.99 AUD

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why Laurence Gonzales. This is an awesome book which I definitely recommend to anyone interested in this kind of stuff. It is organised as a "storybook", that is, the kind of book you can just read from front to back, rather than a reference book (almost all of the books on this page are reference books). You will learn a huge amount about real-life survival situations from reading these true stories.

The spiel for "Deep Survival" goes like this:

Fascinating for any reader, and absolutely essential for anyone who takes a hike in the woods, this book will change the way readers understand themselves and the great outdoors.

After her plane crashes, a seventeen-year-old girl spends eleven days walking through the Peruvian jungle. Against all odds, with no food, shelter, or equipment, she gets out. A better-equipped group of adult survivors of the same crash sits down and dies. What makes the difference? Examining such stories of miraculous endurance and tragic death-how people get into trouble and how they get out again (or not) — Deep Survival takes us from the tops of snowy mountains and the depths of oceans to the workings of the brain that control our behavior. Through close analysis of case studies, Laurence Gonzales describes the "stages of survival" and reveals the essence of a survivor-truths that apply not only to surviving in the wild but also to surviving life-threatening illness, relationships, the death of a loved one, running a business during uncertain times, even war.

Laurence Gonzales is a contributing editor for National Geographic Adventure magazine. The winner of numerous awards, he can be found at his website www.deepsurvival.com.

Click here to purchase from Australia (Soft Cover) $24.99 AUD

Click here to purchase from Australia (Hard Cover) $40.99 AUD

Where There is No Doctor, David Werner. This is the standard medical book for places without modern medical care. It's not a "wilderness medicine" style of book designed to keep you alive until you can be helicopter-lifted to a modern first-world hospital. It's the book to get if you have ever wondered how people would get by in the absence of modern Western high-tech medical care.

Having been written for people in third-world countries who might not have much english or a uni degree in medical science, it's also very easy to understand.

From the sales pitch — "With 3 million copies in print in over 50 languages, Where There Is No Doctor is the most widely used health care manual in use in developing countries today. Using simple language and hundreds of drawings, the book provides information about recognising, treating and preventing common illnesses and injuries. But it is far more than simple first aid information. It covers a wide range of subjects that affect the health of the villager - from diarrhoea to tuberculosis, from helpful and harmful home remedies to the cautious use of certain modern medicines. Special importance is placed on cleanliness, a healthy diet, vaccination, childbirth and family planning."

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $28.49 AUD

Wilderness Evasion: A Guide to Hiding Out and Eluding Pursuit in Remote Areas, Michael Chesbro. This is the only book I have seen on this topic. Most of the survival books have a chapter on how to get other people to find you, this is the book for if you think you might ever not want to be found.

The advertising for this book goes "Do you need to get away from the pressures of the world and the gaze of Big Brother for a while? Do you plan to live or work in a remote area where you need to be able to take care of yourself? Do you want to develop the skills to remain undiscovered in the back country - even if others are searching for you? If so, Wilderness Evasion is for you. You don't have to be on the run to benefit from this unique survival book: it includes skills you can use every day in your real life. Whether you're heading into the woods for evasion purposes or just a little relaxation, you should know what this manual can teach you about survival medicine, emergency caching, communications, food and water procurement and storage, counter anti-tracking, and the psychological aspects of being alone in the back country, among other things. The ability to remain alive, self-reliant and in control of your environment - even in the remotest of areas - is one that few people possess these days. Learning the skills taught in this book can keep you alive for as long as you need to be in the wilderness. For academic study only." Note the disclaimer at the end that it is for academic study only.

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $26.49 AUD

The Worst-case Scenario Survival Handbook: Christmas by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht. This is a cool book that I bought cheap from a discount shop in Sydney a couple of years ago. (They are in an underground subway near the bus interchange between Central station and broadway if you want to look for it, but it was at least two years ago.) For more information on my site see the page "Surviving Christmas".

It would make an ideal present to give to anyone who is into "survival", or for anyone who is into survival to give to anyone they know.

You can get it very cheap from Amazon.com (new from about $3), or in Australia you can get it from "The Nile" (which will arrive more quickly, presumably, for people who are in Australia).

Click here to purchase from Australia (The Nile) $22.49 AUD