Wilderness Survival

List Price: $19.95 Discount Price: $11.07

Customer Reviews:

Both Interesting and useful - highly recommended [Posted on 2006-02-18]
Wilderness Survival is a valuable source of information on woodland survival techniques. Like most books on this subject, he covers shelter, acquisition of water, food, fire building and signaling to search and rescue personnel. A significant bonus is the excellent section on land navigation included by Davenport. The illustrations are nothing to write home about, but still quite clear and effective. This book includes a surprising amount of good information considering how little time it takes to read. One reviewer criticized the book because the material was "almost word for word from about 10 different books I own". From my perspective, any single book that provides the information of 10 is worth owning.

Second Edition [Posted on 2006-08-10]
Davenport's second edition is worth the purchase. He has updated the signaling chapter and expanded all others making it even better then it already was. If you want the definitive guide to learning outdoor survival skills, the second edition of Wilderness Survival is the book.

Wilderness Survival [Posted on 2007-09-21]
This review is based on the first edition (1998) of Wilderness Survival. In his introduction, Davenport writes: "The five basic elements of wilderness survival are personal protection (clothes, shelter, and fire), signaling, sustenance (water and food), travel, and health (dealing with traumatic injuries, environmental injuries, and stress)." This book's emphasis is on surviving, getting out, and being found. It is not about connecting with nature or exploring the possibilities of a primitive lifestyle.

After a perfunctory chapter on climate, Davenport covers those "five basic elements of survival" in the order he listed them in the introduction. There is no discussion of natural cordage or the use of bark or clay in constructing containers of any sort, nor does he illustrate improvised fish hooks or even discuss how to derive one -- all of which Raymond Mears does, scattered through the chapters of his 1992 book The Outdoor Survival Handbook, the book I read before Davenport's.

There are 8 pages on snares and traps, some of the illustrations taking half a page. There are 2 pages on skinning, gutting and butchering an animal, and 2 on tanning an animal's hide. That's 12 pages out of 172. Anyone serious about finding food in the wilderness would seek more detail than the 37 total pages devoted to it here. That, of course, is a limitation of any survey of survival techniques, and why there can be entire books devoted to only a few facets of wilderness survival.

In fire making, for example, both Davenport and Mears spend time explaining the construction and use of the bow drill, but only Mears mentions the hand drill, and neither of them even hints at the possibility of the fire plow, the method used by Tom Hanks to start fire in the film Castaway. Both of them assume you have at least a knife, and so neither of them mentions the dire need in wilderness survival to be able to tear, break, and cut things, nor do they mention any method of devising a cutting tool from the natural environment. Les Stroud, in his Survivorman series, has established the practical value of a multi-tool for survival where there are man-made objects that could be disassembled or cannibalized in some way and used contrary to their original purpose; but even Stroud demonstrated flint-knapping to make a rudimentary cutting edge while in the Utah desert.

Davenport, with his origins in the U.S. Air Force survival school, apparently hasn't considered that not everyone will find themselves trying to survive already equipped with a knife and ready supply of parachute cord. In an appendix, he illustrates 7 knots and lashes: square knot, double sheet bend, overhand fixed loop, bowline, double half hitch, square lash and shear lash. But not having shown us how to make cordage from the environment around us, if we don't have any man-made equivalent, his helpful illustrations may be of no help at all.

His discussion of compass and map navigation and of how to locate North without a compass is clear and useful, but a curious reader would probably wish for more detail. He doesn't, for example, extrapolate from using an analog wristwatch in locating North to using an imaginary or drawn circle divided into 12 segments and your knowledge of the time from some other source; and from his instructions on how to locate the North Star using the Big Dipper or Cassiopeia, you'd never imagine the star was part of the Little Dipper. In his pursuit of concision, he sometimes fails to teach.

The book is designed like a semi-expanded outline, with no peripheral comments. This makes the book easy to read and study. If its limitations of content are not a concern, it is a good first look at surviving in the wild.

Survival Synopsis [Posted on 2008-04-06]
Gregory Davenport's book on survival provides an excellent high-level overview of outdoor survival. Though I would not trust my ability to survive having only read this book it gave me an idea of what would be required to not perish in the wilderness. I plan on using the knowledge in this book to play around while I am out camping this summer. This book is great for anyone who likes camping and the outdoors.

Not what I expected [Posted on 2008-12-23]
I bought this book for research for the novel I am writing, in which the main character is forced to survive on her own in the wilderness. I got this book because I was searching for information that would make my story believable.

well, as far as the information contained in the book, I think it's pretty good. The problem is (and maybe I just didn't read the description well enough, but I don't think that was the problem) that I was looking for info on how to survive with little to no modern supplies. This guy's info is all about how to survive with a bunch of modern stuff (what kind of backpack, what to pack in your survival kit, etc.), which is not what I needed. What if someone isn't meaning to be out in the wilderness at all, but gets stranded? This book wouldn't be any help for someone like that. Most of the info in the book is based on the assumption that you have quite a few modern supplies.

so while the info was good, this book was not what I needed, and ultimately not very helpful.

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