A Highly Recommended Book for Outdoor Survival and General Skills

I enjoyed reading through this book. It gave me some ideas as to items I should purchase and bring along on my hunting and fishing adventures.

Pretty good book love steve and all his insight

Whether it's for yourself or a gift, I don't think you'll find an outdoorsman who doesn't love this book. You're sure to learn something. Everything from gear and shelter to emergency wilderness care. This book covers a ton and is a great read. The people from MeatEater really know how to put a spin on things to make the content relatable and enjoyable to read.

As a survival manual, this book leaves a lot to be desired. Even Steve Rinella's brother wrote of the book "The target audience for all this is clearly hunting-curious nonhunters because seasoned hunters don’t need 101-level how-to content." I wish I saw this before I bought the book. If you are a more experienced outdoorsman, skip. If you are not and want a survival manual, the SAS guide is a better book by far. With all this being said, there are still a few tidbits to learn and I definitely found some pieces of info useful but still not worth it as a whole.

There are other issues but my two main ones are:

1. the sketches are colorless and not detailed. For those diagrams of edible and poisonous plants, they are effectively useless for actual identification purposes
2. it's written almost exclusively in prose, as opposed to bullet points or tables which makes it hard to reference information quickly or be able to summarize what you read. There are countless examples where information is spread over several paragraphs or pages and could easily be put into table format to be far better communicated.

It does have a lot of good info but it is veryyyy dry. I wish they put more real life stories as examples in with the endless lists.

This book was packed full of great info for anyone engaged in outdoor activities, and delivered in the classic Rinella / MeatEater fashion which made me laugh out loud a few times and smile regularly during the read. This will serve as a great resource I know I’ll refer back to over the years