Sam Sheridan, The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse
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Seeking a plan for the end of the world
Sam Sheridan could have been Batman. The dude is a former wilderness firefighter, merchant marine and EMT who graduated from Harvard, studied with a muay thai master in Thailand, and did construction work in Antarctica — and all of that came before he started working on The Disaster Diaries.
A renaissance man’s guide to surviving the end times, this book depicts Sheridan jumping through all kinds of hoops in pursuit of preparedness — not just shooting ranges and firebuilding, either. We’re talking stunt driving, knife fighting, bugout-bag packing, elk hunting, igloo building and more. He traipses through bleakest Arizona with primitive-living expert Cody Lundin. He learns how to steal cars from an ex-con in Los Angeles. He gets some long, hard lessons on dog sledding from Inuit guides in Nunavut. Still, The Disaster Diaries transcends its straight-up usefulness at every turn. A skilled storyteller with a journalistic mindset, Sheridan is always sneaking in some telling details about this survivalist’s paranoid monologues, or that thief’s regret, or some tough guy’s considerable ego. And the author’s own wild flights of fancy — chapters frequently begin with him battling zombies, escaping super-quakes, beating back mutant gangs, or dodging alien spider robots — give the book an occasional touch of the surreal that’ll either heighten your own paranoia or put your mind at ease.
As readers, we can enjoy the book as a true-life first-person adventure story while taking solace in the fact that Sheridan is preparing for an apocalypse that will probably never happen. Probably.
