Wilderness Living

Mostly pretty common sense but provides a good historical picture of traditional wlderness skills.. enjoyable read, good conversation piece.

Wilderness Living contains all the basic information you might need for a long-term living arrangement in the wild. It covers all sorts of methods for providing shelter, water, food, clothing, tanning and tools/implements in a primitive environment, even if you have limited or no "man-made tools" available to you. I thoroughly appreciate that the author states right up front that your ingenuity is your best survival tool... because, while this book has lots of examples, it certainly doesn't cover everything you might need if you're out in the bush for extended periods. The author gives you the basic knowledge and assumes that you will be able to take his examples and expound on them to devise whatever else you might need to survive and prosper... which is exactly how someone living in the middle of nowhere needs to be able to perform!

Anyone planning an extended trip into the wilderness should tuck this book into their pack "just in case"!

This is a great book, a lot of good and useful skills in it.I find the water procurement chapter rather incomplete and because water procurement is of such high priority in the wilderness I don't see why he shared so little about it. He doesn't tell you how to build solar stills and other very important skills.
However most wilderness books leave something out so be prepared to do some research no matter what book you buy. I highly recommend this one.

Sure, this book claims to teaches you how to do a a lot of things to survive, except one thing: it doesn't teach you how to string up a log into the trees, so that when someone walks by and unwittingly pulls a trigger, the log comes swinging down and crushes them - like what Arnold Schwarzenegger did to Predator. I haven't yet figured out how a single person can do this, unless you're using a complex lever and pulley system. Anyways, you've really got to fortify some kind of defense if you want to survive, and at least encircle your lair with punji pits.

Gregory Davenport's book is a masterpiece of clarity and brevity, and it covers all the bases. Use it as a reference book, as opposed to a cover-to-cover read. For instance, it starts off with a chapter on making buckskin. It's just the right level of detail if you're tanning a hide, but too much for the casual reader. Another example is the wonderful chapter on making snares. Davenport lists some nineteen types, all illustrated, and all with a practical application. Davenport's education was clearly of the outdoor variety, at the expense of the indoor variety, resulting in some cumbersome syntax, and excessive passive voice, but perhaps his editor is more to blame for that. Overall, it is a genuine masterpiece, and my copy is already dog-eared with use.