Product Description

Whether you are a novice hiker or camper, or a more experienced outdoorsperson who spend weeks or months in the wilderness The Outdoor Survival Handbook will help you make the most of your adventures in the great outdoors. Suvival-skills expert Raymond Mears delivers dependable, thorough, and easy-to-understand advice on every aspet of outdoor survival, season by season. The essential everyday skills you'll learn include how to:

construct a warm, waterproof shelter at any time of the year
build a good fire in all kinds of weather
gather, prepare, and cook wild foods for tasty and nutritional meals
identify medicinal herbs
collect and purify water
track and idenfity animals
orienteer using map, compass, and natural navigational aids
make tools and equipment from natural materials
and much more.

Filled with practical tips and hundreds of useful drawings and diagrams, this book will help outdoorspeople of all experience levels mater the art of taking full enjoyment in the wilderness without violating the natural wonders that surround them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93876 in Books
• Published on: 1993-06-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780312093594
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Library Journal
Mears, who teaches woodlore courses, advocates learning to "see through the eyes of an indigenous native." He emphasizes a back-to-nature philosophy and survival skills that can be applied nearly anywhere. The line drawings are very good; Mears is obviously knowledgeable and writes clearly. The book is a mixture of very basic skills, such as making fire, plus recipes for outdoor cooking, truck identification, basket making, and poisonous fungi identification. Unfortunately, each topic receives just one or two pages, and no references for further reading are supplied. Furthermore, this book was first published in Great Britain, and all the supply source addresses are British. Readers wanting some depth and American specificity would do better with Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival (Berkley Bks., 1984) or Paul Rezendes's Tracking and the Art of Seeing ( LJ 10/15/92). Not recommended.
- Roland Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Raymond Mears is a frequent lecturer on outdoors survival skills and an expert on the survival techniques of native people. He lives in England.

Customer Reviews

Good general information
While Mears' book has clear illustrations and an interesting (seasonal) organization, other books such as Outdoor Survival Skills by Larry Dean Olsen and How to Stay Alive in the Woods by Bradford Angier both provide more in depth, specific information.

The Outdoor Survival Handbook
The subtitle of this book is: a guide to the resources and materials available in the wild and how to use them for food, shelter, warmth, and navigation. The author has parceled out his observations, instruction and advise according to the four seasons. So rather than having a single chapter on types of shelter which one could locate or construct in the wilderness within the various climates or seasons, he parcels out this information over the four main chapters of the book. He does this for each category of survival: shelter, fire, water, cordage, and food. His intention seems to be that the reader use the book as an introductory survival course beginning in the spring, focusing on the particular type of shelter shown in that chapter and not getting distracted by other types that either cannot or need not be built then.

There is some sense to this kind of organization, but yet he leaves any discussion of hygiene or cooking, for example, until the summer chapter, when surely this information would have been just as relevant to the spring. If you have to at least selectively read ahead anyway to be better informed, why not just organize the book from the start so that the categories of survival occur as separate chapters, with the special circumstances of each season being discussed within the category, rather than breaking the content of the category across the four seasons? But the organization according to seasons allows the author to focus upon nature as it lives in each season, which seems to be as important to him as the types of shelter or the various methods of starting a fire.

The book is well illustrated and feels quite accessible. There is quite a bit of useful information on tinder and laying out fuel for a fire, even though it doesn't all occur, as it logically should, in a single chapter; and there is much, also, on cordage, but again, not all in one place. Because of the large and clear illustrations, it seems a good enough first book on wilderness survival. It does not overwhelm the reader with detail, but for some readers it is that very complexity of detail and a more rigorous organization that would be missed.

An excellent skills book for beginners and old hands alike.
This was the first of Rays books I bought.
It is an exceelent collection of how to themes and skills to learn and use. Brilliant for Scouts and Leaders alike, as well as any other woodsman.
Highly Recommended.