I've met Neil, on his book tour in London, I'm a huge fan of his book The Game, raved about it to all my friends and have probably brought a dozen or so copies to hand out to friends. When I read it, for me, it had a certain resonance, as I read the stories about as i could understand and related to some ( not all!) of the scenarios that he wrote about. When reading the synopsis about this book, I felt that same. I had often thought about worst case scenarios, what would happen, what could happen and what would I do to survive. Not in an the world is going to end tomorrow outlook, but it's just a little thought at the back of my head in a corner of my mind. With the current state of the world, the economy and the uncertain times, I thought this book would at least be an interesting read.
Strauss's style of writing is easy to read, it certainly kept me hooked and I read it in less then a day. There seemed for me a disconnect between the Strauss of "The game" and the Strauss of this book. Over half the book is dedicated to him looking at ways of dual citizenship. It just seemed to me that he was running around like a headless chicken. The Strauss of the game immersed himself in his subject matter, he learnt from the best, stayed in their world, and took on board all the viewpoints to mesh together everything. This Neil Strauss is asking for lawyers to sort it out for him. He has high powered contacts, can make it to the White House, is in contact with celebs and billionaires and yet sits around trying to figure out how to make this happen? It just seemed to me completely incongruent with the things he had learnt as "Style" in The Game.
There are some interesting talks that he has with a couple of billionaires, and honestly I wished he'd expanded a little bit more about their world.
Long story cut short. He spends the rest of the time with survivalists and emergency responders learning how to live off the land, and generally not being scared by it all. That's pretty much it in a nutshell. I found some useful tips, but generally I had figured out most of it already. It's a strange book. Worth a read, would it save my life? Probably not. That's down to me, and I didn't need a book to tell me that.
