I'm not all that interested in participating in the "Lending Library" myself - being in Canada, I suspect that after paying shipping and customs and excise fees, it would usually end up being cheaper to buy the books myself. But it occurred to me that this forum might also be a good place to publish book reviews (personal opinions) so that others who are thinking about buying a particular book might be able to make a more informed decision.

I received as a Christmas gift "The SAS Handbook of Living off the Land" by Chris McNab. After looking through it, I would give it 2 out of 5. (I was going to give it a 3, but in writing this review I have revised my opinion downwards) It contains some very useful information - most of it I have read in other books, true, but in some cases those books may be out of print or hard to find. Unfortunately, it contains some factual errors, some glaring ommissions, and downright bad advice.

1. On page 18, he recommends carrying waterproof matches, using the old Boy Scout trick of dipping the match heads in liquid candle wax. Unfortunately, directly facing this, on page 19, he has a full page diagram of a Tobacco tin or Altoids tin style PSK, in which the only fire-starting material is a book of paper matches. Not only that, the "Water purification tablets" and "Antibiotics" are shown in loose form, with no discussion of how to package them; this might lead some readers to conclude that they could take a handful of iodine tablets and just toss them loose (or, at best, enclose then in a mini plastic zip-lock bag) in the metal container.

2. The one-page diagram of how to perform CPR on page 24 is so appallingly bad that I am going to take a red marker and put a big "X" through it, in case the book should fall into the wrong hands. He recommends placing the heel of the hand two fingers BELOW the Xiphoid process, rather than above it. The drawing of a woman administering CPR on an unconscious male companion clearly shows her hands too low down on the chest.

3. His description of making improvised snowshoes (pp. 144-145) is not very good. He advocates fastening the snowshoe securely to the foot, at the ball, instep, and heel. I can't believe the author has ever tried snowshoeing, certainly not with a contraption like that, for any length of time.

For those who don't know, a snowshoe should pivot about the ball of the foot, and the rest of the foot should be unattached; this uses much less energy (you don't have to lift the entire snowshoe off the ground every time you take a step) and it's much easier on your feet, because you don't feel like someone is trying to snap your foot in half every time you lift it.

The first - in fact, the only - time I went snowshoeing, in the army reserves, I was given a pair of snowshoes put together by someone who didn't know this, and had attached the binding to the front of the "foot-hole" instead of the rear. After half a day of walking in these instruments of torture, I was almost crippled. When we stopped for lunch, I spent the entire break with cold, numb fingers undoing the bindings and re-attaching them. Of course, Murphy had the last laugh - on day two, when we grabbed our snowshoes after breakfast, someone had taken mine and left me with a pair in which *one* of the bindings was attached incorrectly. <img src="images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

4. The book makes absolutely no mention, that I could find, of how to signal for help. The PSK on page 19 does not even contain a signal mirror or a compass. Granted, it is a book about living off the land, and not about survival, per se. But it is peppered throughout with references to "the survivor" or "a survival situation", so I think, at the very VERY least, the author should have inserted a disclaimer saying that "signalling for help is not covered in this book".

These are mistakes that I picked up because I was at least familiar with the material; how many other mistakes there are in the book that I didn't have the expertise to spot, I can only imagine. (For example, can you really extract water from a barrel cactus by sucking it through a hollow reed, as McNab claims on page 130? I'd like to know whether this is correct before I need to try it for real.)

I found it interesting that the book says nothing about Mr. McNab's qualifications as a survival expert, only as an author. In particular, it says nothing about whether he has ever been affiliated with the SAS in any capacity. By comparison, John "Lofty" Wiseman's books contain a reasonably extensive biography (at least to the point of declaring that he spent 26 years with the SAS and was a survival instructor with that regiment).

The book is not a total waste - in a survival situation, I'd rather have it than no book at all, and not just to start fires with. But it's not something I would make a point of bringing with me, if there were other manuals available. Chris McNab is no Lofty Wiseman.

Disclaimer: Of course, this represents my personal opinion of the book, nothing more.