280 of 305 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Flaws of This Book Are Hazardous to Your Well-being, October 26, 2010
This review is from: Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens (Paperback)
The author has the right idea in that we should be prepared for various situations "just in case" and wrote an easy-to-read book full of mostly excellent information, but Kathy Harrison should have quit while she was ahead.
The book's strength is in home preparedness for the beginner, particularly food preparation, recipes, and storage which comprise more than 50 pages of the nearly 230-page text. However, if you have a carport instead of a garage, don't have a basement, live in an apartment, or rent, you need a lot of imagination to adapt her advice to your living arrangement and you'll need to accept that parts simply aren't going to work.
Where the author fails is in areas away from the house.
For my first example, the car repair kit on p. 87 inexplicably includes window washer fluid, a PINT of oil, and engine coolant. However, if a vehicle is well-maintained as she advises, there's absolutely no need to waste valuable space on storing these items in your vehicle. Surely, barring vehicular damage, nothing more than gas and air for tire pressure is required for the length of time she advocates preparing, which is as short as three days to as long as a month or two. And, what's the point of having only a pint of oil especially when oil is typically sold by the quart? You're much better off utilizing the space for things you really need, like drinking water.
For another example, the wilderness travel hiking kit on pp. 175-176, she unfathomably recommends a folding camp grill and mess kit, omitting any mention of food other than snack foods that don't require heating or cooking. Not only that, she's apparently unaware that since many places ban open fires, you're much better off with a backpacker's stove and fuel although she does list a stove and fuel for the car emergency kit on p. 88.
It isn't as though she's solely addressing a survival situation where you might have to disregard an open fire ban in order to save your life because she heads her wilderness travel lists with: "If you are a frequent hiker, a few simple items should always be in your pocket or daypack" and "For longer hikes to more remote locations, a larger pack will provide space for more equipment...."
But, what about infrequent hikers? Doesn't preparedness apply to them as well, perhaps more so because of their lack of experience?
In the text, she mentions boiling water, except you don't need a camp grill to accomplish that and, if your water bottle is stainless steel, you won't need anything from the mess kit, either, although you could use the cordage and maybe the duct tape or the heavy work gloves you brought for sawing wood, none of which she mentions, to retrieve your bottle from the heat of the fire without burning yourself on the hot stainless steel.
What? There's no mention of duct tape or cord in the wilderness hiking list? Yikes!
It gets worse.
For hydration, she recommends only a water bottle with filter or a "good-quality" filtering water bottle, not extra water, not halogens, nor that the key word is "microfilter" instead of "filter." At first, I suspected the author glossed over this topic in the wilderness section because she didn't want to spend time doing the necessary research which is a great way to get you terribly sick while being falsely confident that you're prepared because you bought a filtering water bottle like she said.
However, in an earlier section, she spends over four pages discussing water purification in the home although I recognized the illustration of the portable water filter as being of a filtering bottle suitable only for filtering potable tap water, that is, for aesthetic reasons. Also, for the adult evacuation kit on p. 95, she does mention a pocket purifier and purifying tablets. The inconsistencies of the book, making readers piece things together as best they can, if they can, which for newbies may be difficult with so much to process, is highly irresponsible especially for a vital necessity like safe drinking water.
For my final example, she lists a compass on p. 175, but not a topographical map without which is the best way to get lost and remain lost until your dead body is found as has happened to others who ventured into the wilds with inadequate knowledge and gear. The author does have GPS on the car emergency list on p. 88, failing to mention that the considerably more expensive GPS receiver isn't 100% reliable which is why outdoor experts stress our needing to know how to navigate with a map and compass.
Frankly, considering how much she preaches getting off the grid and avoiding reliance on the government, I'm surprised that she contradicts herself by listing GPS instead of a map. Not only is a GPSr not 100% reliable, what the government giveth, the government may taketh away especially for national security or military purposes. Don't get me wrong. I bought a GPSr over four years ago. However, I still keep a Rand McNally road atlas in the car and just bought a laminated road map for my Go bag "just in case" along with a bottle of Map Sealer to waterproof a couple of favorite city maps.
I realize my low rating may seem unduly harsh, but not only did I not learn anything new, the flaws contributing to illness or potential death nullify a lot of the weight of her guidance that's well-worth following.
If Harrison had stuck to home preparedness and did more to address what those who live in other types of homes could do instead of dropping the ball for the applicable areas as she did, I might have rated it five stars. It's because of the excellent advice she included that I didn't award the lowest one star.
So, use "Just In Case" for its strengths, if you want, with the understanding that the flaws are so bad they're hazardous to your well-being. It's because of the flaws that I'm rating the book with merely two stars since they really will put you in danger or distress if you blindly trust every word she's written.
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77 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Be Scared, Be Prepared, August 31, 2008
This review is from: Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens (Paperback)
DON'T BE SCARED, BE PREPARED, A Review Of Kathy Harrison's "Just In Case"
[...]
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Kathy Harrison and her husband Bruce live in Western Massachusetts and have spent many years parenting hundreds of foster kids, and in fact, in 1996 were named by their state as Foster Parents of the Year. Kathy has devoted her life to caring for homeless, abused, and neglected children, and has written two other books before Just In Case entitled Another Place At The Table and One Small Boat. That's why, unlike most preparedness books, this one is supremely family-oriented, born in the heart of an ordinary mom who simply cares about the safety and well being of her family.
As we mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of a ravaged New Orleans and Gulf Coast and as the residents of those areas again wait breathlessly to see where the volatile Hurricanes Gustav and Hanna are headed, a review of Harrison's third book, Just In Case: How To Be Self-Sufficient When The Unexpected Happens is especially timely.
Harrison notes that this book is not about long-term survival and emphasizes that her "objective with this book is to offer access to the kind of crisis information that will be helpful to ordinary families in extraordinary situations." Therefore, she hasn't offered directions for making shoes or clothing or hunting and skinning game animals for food. Consequently, her introduction asks some exceedingly practical but tough questions:
**Can you provide your family with sufficient food if the grocery stores are closed?
**Do you have access to safe, clean water if the municipal water system or you well is compromised?
**Can you keep your home warm if fuel supplies are disrupted?
**Do you have a source of light if the power grid goes down during a storm?
**Can you evacuate your home with three days' worth of supplies for each family member in five minutes?
**Can you shut down your home systems in ten minutes?
Many Truth To Power readers are also familiar with Sharon Astyk's Causabon's Book site and the Simply Living website which offer an abundance of suggestions for food storage and rotation and which I cannot recommend highly enough. Their emphasis, however, is a bit more long-term whereas Just In Case is specifically a family disaster prep tool intended to prepare folks for an acute crisis situation.
The book's first section uses the acronym "OAR" which stands for "Organize, Acquire, and Rotate". As we organize what we already have, we get clear on what we need to acquire, and then after acquiring it, we need to rotate those materials so that they do not become antiquated and therefore useless in an emergency.
In Harrison's Preparedness section, her "Personal Preparedness" chapter, addresses health, skills, bookkeeping and financial preparedness, and how to conduct "trial run" drills with the family once a month to practice for a quick evacuation of the home. Also addressed are: preparedness with children, pets, and preparing your car.
A section dealing specifically with disaster instructs the reader about what to do in an emergencies such as the loss of power, fire in the home, natural disasters, toxic hazards, pandemics, and terrorism.
Although Just In Case, as stated above, does not focus on long-term preparation, its last section offers skills for independence which indeed are useful for a more protracted descent away from the status quo as energy depletion, infrastructure, financial, and climate change collapses intensify. The skills section addresses water purification, cold storage, heating with wood, and gathering and harvesting wild foods. In addition, Harrison has included a section on wilderness survival.
Her "Food From Scratch" section offers in-depth instructions regarding canning and dehydrating food, as well as pickling and making yogurt and cheese. And for those wondering how they might actually prepare stored foods that would produce tasty, tantalizing meals from them, Harrison gives us an entire chapter entitled "The Stored Food Cookbook."
I must confess that Kathy Harrison not only captured my mind in this book but also won my heart. I feel her compassion and protectiveness of her readers and their families in every page. Here's one exemplary paragraph from her introduction:
We live in precarious times, with a looming specter of global warming and climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and food insecurity assaulting us every day. Many families live only a paycheck away from homelessness. Our fragile and interdependent system of transportation, communication, and finance leaves most Americans only a few days away from hunger. My intention is to encourage all families to become familiar with the basic goods and skills necessary for self-reliance should the worst happen.
While as Harrison notes, the world has always been a scary place, this is the first generation that has fallen into total dependence on a fragile network of vulnerable independent systems. Food, for example, as became so blatantly obvious this year, is inextricably connected to transportation and fuel. Those who occasionally shop at big box or chain stores have certainly noticed sections of shelves or entire shelves that are empty these days. When one inquires about where these items are, the usual response is, "Well, the trucks haven't delivered them yet" or "we were out of that item for weeks, and finally the trucks came and brought a shipment, but customers have cleaned them out already." All of these systems depend on the others, and as Harrison succinctly summarizes: "...the whole system will collapse in a domino effect that could bring our usual lives to a screeching halt. The shelves will be empty, the money will dry up, the lights will go out, the cars won't run, and people will stay at home."
The other possibility is that people won't stay home because they will no longer have a home to go to as a result of foreclosure or natural disaster. In that case, we would see massive homelessness, wandering, and migration, and then it would be crucial to have a variety of wilderness survival skills.
I haven't been able to put Kathy Harrison's book down and move on to another. I highly recommend your purchasing it sooner rather than later as an indispensable investment in your own and your family's survival.
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