Book Review: The Urban Prepper’s Guide

Book Review: The Urban Prepper’s Guide
This is written by guest poster Melonie Kennedy

As many preppers know, there are plenty of authors out there who tell readers that the best way to be prepared for emergencies is to buy a bunch of land, raise your own cattle, grow your own grain, and learn how to cover your own medical needs, from fixing fillings to birthing babies.

But what if there’s something keeping you in the city, you like your house in the suburbs, or you don’t want to milk your own cows? Maybe you simply want a list of items to keep at the office in case the power goes out. Perhaps you battled your way through the Toilet Paper Apocalypse of 2020 and realized there’s got to be a better way.

Jim Cobb’s new release, The Urban Prepper’s Guide: How to Become Self-Sufficient and
Prepared for the Next Crisis , has you covered. Well-established in the preparedness realm, Cobb dials things in for readers across the spectrum of preparedness. Those newer to emergency preparedness will benefit greatly from the breakdown of topics in a manner that gives the basics, for instance listing the methods of food preservation and gives them a springboard to go research the “how-to” of each method. After all, we don’t know what we don’t know until someone shows us, right?

Folks who are further along on their preparedness journey can still make good use of the included checklists while updating car and office kits, or perhaps upskilling with recipes for hand sanitizer and instructions for making a clay pot heater. Readers of all backgrounds can make good use of the chapters about estate planning and finances, as well as the myth-busting inserts about using feminine hygiene products for first aid and wasp spray for defense. Too many “experts” in the field don’t address these issues; readers can rest assured this author will help you consider all the angles.

The Urban Prepper’s Guide isn’t meant to be a deep dive into one single subject; it’s meant to help you assess your needs, offer you options, and show you what to research to best prepare your family and household —and it does it beautifully, without a call for acreage or cows!

Understanding the basics of soft skills can help us realize we want to work on our conflict resolution methods and we can seek further insights; an overview of emergency evacuations may help remind us that as the kids have gotten older and changed grades, we need to learn what the pick-up plan is for their schools in an emergency. Cobb could easily have turned each of these chapters into its own book, but this version will be enough to get most folks onto the road to preparedness or brushing up on things they’ve let slip as the prepping years have passed.