Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26746 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Review
Praise for the first edition:

"How we have survived this long without Public Works I don't know. The concept is brilliant and simple. Szykitka has assembled 1,000 pages of sheer Information, almost all of it in the public domain, almost all of it available in booklet form from various government agencies or other public services. You and I are lazy and feckless, and if we are troubled by mildew we don't get around to writing the Department of Agriculture for guidance. (Or if we do, the mildew has either vanished or triumphed by the time the booklet arrives.) Szykitka, however, is a persistent fellow with an unbridled lust for collecting basic knowledge. If we had lived in a rural community a century ago, much of the knowledge gathered here would have been in our bones."

--Harper's Magazine, October 28, 1974


"It has the hand-hewn feel of the old Whole Earth Catalog and the weight of a phone book. . . . I find it to be perfect bedtime reading, and my dreams are filled with the care of corn crops and methods of collecting water after falling from an airplane. Public Works gives me fantasies of starting over with a few acres of farmland, a hammer, and a saw, and provides me with a vision of unelectrified reliance." --Paul Ford, The Morning News (Web-based periodical), November 26, 2002

Review
"It has the hand-hewn feel of the old Whole Earth Catalog and the weight of a phone book. . . . I find it to be perfect bedtime reading, and my dreams are filled with the care of corn crops and methods of collecting water after falling from an airplane. Public Works gives me fantasies of starting over with a few acres of farmland, a hammer, and a saw, and provides me with a vision of unelectrified reliance." --Paul Ford, The Morning News (Web-based periodical), November 26, 2002

From the Back Cover
Rural homesteaders and urban apartment dwellers alike will find a mother lode of practical information in The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living. This selective compendium of public-domain documents, many of them no longer available today, provides in one single volume a wealth of knowledge and useful instruction on just about every aspect of self-sufficiency, from building a living structure and growing food to staying healthy and using tools of all kinds.
More than 600 pages of pamphlets, documents, and articles are reproduced here in facsimile, making this a true cornucopia of practical advice. Learn how to:

Build a greenhouse
Administer first aid
Stock a shelter in case of nuclear attack
Build a stone wall
Survive in the wilderness, at sea, and in the city
Plant, prune, and propagate trees and shrubs
Read architect's drawings
Care for your pets
Keep bees and harvest honey
Remove stains and prevent mildew
Weave fabric and repair clothing
Hunt, trap, and fish
Repair a screen or leaking faucet
Relieve allergy symptoms
Build a wood-frame, brick, adobe, or log house
Stay safe during storms and floods
Can, freeze, and dry your garden produce
Control high blood pressure
Cut metal and stone
and much, much more!

Customer Reviews

A Big Book
I bought this for my collection of "survival situation" books, and I think it is a very good addition. This book covers everything from First Aid of Burns, Survival at Sea, Jam Recipes, Hydroponic Farming, to Brick Construction.

My no means is this a definitive book on any of these subjects, but it can be used as a very good general knowledge book on all of them.

Treasure Trove
This is a wonderful book to use or just to dip into for a wealth of information from how to buy a Solar Electric system to how to get rid of hog confinement odor. It's a compilation of government pamphlets on how to do just about anything you could ever think of doing. Bravo!!

Hard to read but packed with information
There is a lot of information in this book, most of which is very interesting and potentially useful. So long as I think of this as a 'reference book' and not a manual or how-to, I'm happy with my purchase of it.

The book's main problem is in presentation. It is a compilation of publication from other sources, primarily the US government. As such the quality of each section varies greatly in age, usability, and legibility. Really, this book should come with a magnifying glass as several sections have been reduced in size to accommodate the format and are made functionally illegible.

In short, if you are looking for a book to tell you how to become 'Self-Reliant', this book isn't going to help you much. If you are approaching self-reliance and need a book to fill in some knowledge gaps, then it is a valuable resource