Amateurish but cute.

This short, 8 minute audio pamphlet isn't revealing any new or groundbreaking information, and is written in a very general, amateurish format, but I found it to be an enjoyable short listen.

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1 person found this helpful

advice is so vague it isn’t useful

I sat down to listen to Amy Rife’s Zombie Survival Essentials with the idea that it would be informative on some level, and possibly entertaining to boot.

The Modern Day Prepper’s Guidebook to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse didn’t manage to do either for me. Mark Westfield does a nice job reading the text. There’s no backgroud noise issues, and he reads cleanly and at an enjoyable pace. But the problem lies with the text itself.

The presentation is dry, much like a textbook but without any neat diagrams or photographs to illustrate the information being relayed; the effect leaves many of the ‘survival tips’ unexplained fully, and could easily confuse someone who wanted useful advice. I’d hoped for perhaps humor to be mixed in, or possibly even examples of how to use some of the survival ideas in the book, but there were none.

Now, the ‘survival ideas’ are another story entirely. I would argue that the majority of the advice given in this book is so vague it isn’t useful, or it boils down to common sense. I guess in an eight minute guidebook you can’t expect much.

The chapter on guns is laughably ill informed. The author advises people to track down a carbine or rifle, with a pistol for backup, but gives no advice as to what brands, styles, calibers, or mechanical types to use. She then suggests that people track down suppressors, or make their own. The good advice there is that she advises that making a suppressor is difficult.

Another bit of ‘survival advice’ is to find a group of survivors, and join them. At any moment I expected to hear advice like ‘use a tent in bad weather’ or even ‘brush your teeth twice daily to avoid cavities.’

Anyone checking this out should be very aware that this is just eight minutes long, and that little to no advice usable in a real survival situation can be explained properly in that time, let alone an entire guidebook’s. I would’ve given more credit to the book had it been tongue-in-cheek, or perhaps was written in a way that led the reader/listened to places where they could find actually usable information, but the book avoids that to keep its brevity.

My advice would be to skip this book for anything meaty or serious, and perhaps dig up something from the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts. They actually would offer information about surviving in an environment that’s difficult or even dangerous.

Audiobook purchased for review by ABR.

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8 people found this helpful

This is some kind of scam.

It's less than 5 minutes. It's completely incoherent. How did this even make it on Audible???

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