The Disaster Diaries

October 29, 2012
Despite disclaimers of not being a nervous survivalist or “a paranoid pessimist,” Sheridan, an amateur boxer and mixed martial arts fighter, uses a collection of stark disaster scenarios to wise up the reader on how to live through those final times. A world traveler with a variety of skills, he envisions a large earthquake in Los Angeles, a zombie invasion, urban unrest, physical injury, and general mayhem, then lists a group of vital measures to beat the odds. Sheridan notes fear, stress, and denial lessen the chances of survival, while preparations such as a month’s worth of food and water and a go-bag filled with daily essentials insure a winning game plan. With a funky sense of humor blended with straight-faced common sense, he not only addresses the long-term psychological trauma of disaster but adds the importance of learning basic first-aid techniques, firearms training, knife skills, hunting and living in the wild, and expertise behind the wheel for a real world escape and survival. As a quirky survivalist primer, Sheridan’s work spells out how to stay alive when the world goes topsy-turvy.

Starred review from November 1, 2012
How to survive any possible disaster, from aliens to zombies to everything in between. If there was a massive earthquake, would you have enough water on hand to last for even a week? In the event of a thermonuclear detonation, would you be able to hot-wire a car quickly enough to escape the shock wave that will kill you? Questions like these (and many more like them) have all occurred to Sheridan (The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game, 2010, etc.) during sleepless nights. A former kickboxer and an experienced sailor, the author's nightmares finally got the better of him once he became a father. "If something was going to happen," he writes, "I wanted to be ready." Using increasingly unlikely theoretical disasters as an impetus, Sheridan set out to learn every possible survival skill, from the most rudimentary (making fire and learning to hunt), to taking a driving clinic for stuntmen, because "when you're driving a slalom course through a zombie-infested city, you need to...maintain control because if you lose it and crash, now you're zombie food." Sheridan is a charming storyteller, and his prose is both thoughtful and playful. He closes the book with a chapter on optimism and the inherent goodness of humanity, stressing that everything he has learned has not made him paranoid and believing that the end of the world is nigh; instead, it's given him the confidence to face anything and the peace of mind that brings him. "At some point," he concludes, "when you've done your best, you have to get on with your life and trust the universe not to fuck you." An upbeat and entertaining survival guide for the end of the world.

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