Emergency Review: The Best-Written of the Four

The best-written of the four, and I scored it 5. Emergency is Neil Strauss learning to survive a collapse he had convinced himself was coming, and it reads differently every decade. The audiobook is abridged, read by Strauss, eight hours seventeen. I have only read this one, so there is no narration score here.

What the book is

Published in 2009, Emergency is what Strauss did after deciding the world was more fragile than he had assumed. He gets a second citizenship, learns to shoot, learns to fly, trains in wilderness survival and emergency medicine, and spends the book turning himself into someone who could leave at short notice.

It works because he is a reporter first. The people he learns from are drawn as people rather than as a movement, and he is consistently funnier about his own panic than a book on this subject usually allows.

⚠️ It is also a book whose reception moves. Read in 2009 it looked like one man's anxiety. Read after 2020 it looks like something else, and that is worth knowing before you start rather than a claim about who was right.

What is in audio

There is an audiobook, Strauss reads it, and it is abridged at eight hours seventeen. "Version: Abridged" is stated on its own product page.

I have not heard it. So, unlike The Game, where I can tell you the abridgement cuts the field reports because I read the book and heard the cut version, I cannot tell you what this one loses. It loses something, because that is what the word means, and anybody who tells you which parts without having done both is guessing.

If you want the whole book, the print is the safe answer. If you want it in your ears knowing it is shorter than the book, that is a reasonable trade and it is your call rather than mine.

The editions

Who it is not for

Anyone who wants a practical manual. It is a memoir about acquiring skills, not a book that teaches them, and readers arriving for the second thing have said so.

Anyone allergic to the subject. A book about preparing to flee is either fascinating or exhausting depending on how you are wired, and there is no middle setting.

Where it sits among his four is on the Neil Strauss author spotlight.