Emergency Neil Strauss Review: The Book That Changed How I Live

Emergency has the highest writing score on this site, 4.75, and it is not a score for the sentences. This is the book on here that changed how I live: it moved my actual decisions about where I live, how I earn, and what I am willing to be tied to. Read it rather than listen to it.

Not in the way books are usually said to change people, meaning you think about something for a week. I wanted to explain the number before anything else, because it is not really a claim about prose. That is what the 4.75 is for.

What is Emergency actually about?

Strauss becomes convinced the world is less stable than his comfortable life suggests, and sets out to acquire the skills and the standing to survive if it comes apart. The book runs his research and his training against the life he already has.

Jacket level, and I will stop there.

What did it actually do to you?

It made me think about life in general, which sounds vague until you see where it went.

It pushed me toward a nomadic frame of mind. Along with The 4-Hour Workweek, it got me asking whether I should be able to move on short notice, and what it would take to actually be able to. That question does not stay in one place. It reached my thinking about long term relationships and when to stay put. It reached whether I should be locked into a single form of income, or work for one business, or keep my options open on both.

Then it made me test the limits.

I wanted to know what would actually happen if I lost housing, or food, or the other things that go first when the situation turns. So, I stopped reading about it and ran it. I spent a year without permanent housing. I went considerably deeper on bug-out bags and on survival preparation in general. And I did a fair amount of work on myself alongside all of it.

I came out the other side knowing what I would do. That is a different state than knowing what a book says about what you should do, and getting from one to the other is the thing this book actually did for me.

I am not recommending anyone run the same experiments. What I am saying is that this is a book that can move you from reading to doing, and that is rarer than a good sentence.

Should you read Emergency or listen to it?

Read it.

The audio reinforces the material and I have no complaint about it. But the book was more helpful, because I could easily reread a section as many times as I needed to actually absorb the content and the context around it.

That is the same thing I have found on every book on this site where the material asks something of you. I retain by controlling the pace. Audio takes the pace away, and this is a book you want to be able to stop inside of.

There is also a plainer reason, and it is a fact about the product rather than a preference of mine. The current paperback is an illustrated edition, and some of the practical material lives in those illustrated pages: Steven Poole in The Guardian refers to its cartoons, and the blogger Christian Sauvé to its short comic-book pages. A book that carries part of its technique in pictures is a book an audiobook cannot hand you in full.

Which audiobook edition is which?

This is the part worth slowing down on, because the audio editions of Emergency do not agree with each other and a shopper cannot tell them apart by name.

The download sold through Amazon and Audible is abridged and runs 8 hours 17 minutes. The 2021 CD line from Blackstone is also abridged and runs 6.27 hours. And the older HarperAudio seven-CD release, under a single ISBN, is described as unabridged and 8 hours by Publishers Weekly and as abridged and 8.25 hours by AudioFile. That is the same identifier, described two different ways by two trade sources.

Nothing found says a second performance was ever recorded, so this is most likely one narrator and different edits rather than rival recordings. But that does not help you at the point of purchase.

Buy by the identifier and the seller's own version field, not by the title or the narrator's name. All of these credit Neil Strauss, and that is exactly why his name cannot tell them apart.

For the avoidance of doubt about my own score: the recording I heard is the 8 hour 17 minute download sold through Amazon and Audible. The 4.0 is for that one. I have not heard the Blackstone CD line or the older HarperAudio release, and I am not going to tell you how they sound.

How is the book organised?

Five parts: Orientation, then Five Steps, then Escape, then Survive, then Rescue, with an extra section at the back.

The weight sits heavily in Part Four. Survive runs about 170 pages of a 432-page book, close to three times the length of any other part, so if the training material is what you came for, that is where the book actually lives.

Two named reviewers found the early going slower. Christian Sauvé described the first third as a shaky start before it strengthens, and Steven Poole found the short course write-ups tedious. Worth knowing before you start, from people who wrote it down at the time.

What should you know before you start?

The book contains firearms and weapons training, animal slaughter, urban evasion, lock-picking and self-defence, and first aid and medical emergencies. Its subject matter is disaster, terrorism, disease, war and economic collapse, and it moves through apocalyptic fear, paranoia and anti-government survivalist thinking as themes.

No publisher or author-approved content note exists for this title. Those topics come from named critics and from retailer and publisher descriptions, so treat them as guidance drawn from the record rather than an official warning list. I am naming the topics and not where they sit in the book.

One more thing, and it is practical rather than editorial. This is a first-person account from 2009 of courses a man took and things that happened to him. It is not current emergency, medical, legal, firearms or disaster-response guidance, and nothing in the sources checked validates every tactic it describes. Read it as a story about learning, and get the actual training from someone teaching it now.

Who should read Emergency, and who should skip it?

Read it if you have ever had the thought that your life has more single points of failure in it than you are comfortable with. The book is a good companion for that thought, and it is honest about how ridiculous the project looks from outside while doing it anyway.

Skip it if you want a manual. This is a reporter's account of learning things, not a reference you can work from, and the practical content is incidental to the story of a man changing his mind about how exposed he is.

Common questions

Is Emergency a survival manual? No, despite the subtitle. It is a first-person account of a man taking courses and acquiring skills, and the practical content sits around the story rather than the other way round. If you want a reference you can work from, this is not it.

Is there an unabridged audiobook of Emergency? Possibly, and that is the honest answer. The download and the current CD line are both labelled abridged, while an older HarperAudio CD edition is called unabridged by one trade reviewer and abridged by another under the same ISBN. Check the version field on whatever listing you are buying from.

How long is the Emergency audiobook? It depends which one you buy. The Amazon and Audible download is 8 hours 17 minutes; the 2021 Blackstone CD line is 6.27 hours. Those are not two ways of describing the same product.

How many pages is Emergency? Amazon and Google Books say 432 for the current illustrated paperback. Open Library and the San Francisco Chronicle both say 418 for the same ISBN, which is the sort of disagreement that is normal across catalogues and is not worth resolving before you buy.