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How to Survive and Thrive During Hard Times

 Copyright © July 1, 2011 by Robert Wayne Atkins, P.E.
All Rights Reserved.



Direct Link to Amazon Web Page for How to Survive and Thrive During Hard Times If you CLICK on the picture on the right then you will be taken to the Amazon web page that features this book.

ISBN: 978-0-615-47657-5
Type of Book: Paperback
Book Size: 8.5 inches by 11 inches
Number of Pages: 500
Number of Full Color Pictures: 418
Number of Sketches and Illustrations in Black and White: 41
Amazon Price: $79.95 with Free Super Saver Shipping (Note: To get free shipping you must click on the small circle in front of the words "Free Shipping" on the right half of your Final Order screen at Amazon.com before you complete your order. Otherwise Amazon will charge you a shipping fee for this book.)


Book Description on Amazon.com

This book contains practical advice on how to survive an economic depression or a natural or manmade disaster that disrupts commerce. It contains alternatives for you to consider so you can make the best possible choices for the comfort and survival of your family during hard times.

This book will provide you with a variety of options to consider in the areas of water and food procurement, gardening options, personal hygiene alternatives, practical battery operated electronic equipment, a summary of the relevant issues related to firearm selection, how to make your own ammunition at home, a common sense discussion of the pros and cons of a variety of different long-term survival strategies, some spiritual encouragement, and some recommendations for your family's continued education and entertainment.

Unlike other books about hard times survival, this book is a hard times reference manual. It is not a book that you read once and then set aside. This book contains information you will need to frequently refer to during hard times as your situation changes. For example, if your water situation changes then you may need to review the information in the 20 page water chapter. If you acquire a different firearm then you may wish to improve your accuracy with that weapon by reviewing the information in the 26 page target shooting chapter.

This manual contains 500 pages with 418 full-color pictures and 41 sketches and illustrations in black and white. The pictures and illustrations will help you follow a set of clear, concise instructions and minimize the chance of making a mistake.

This book is a high quality detailed instruction manual that is worth the price you pay for it.

This reference manual contains information of timeless value. It is the type of book you will pass on to your children and grandchildren. The reason is simple. This book contains detailed instructions on how to do all the following tasks if you should ever need to:
  1. How to make soap using rainwater, campfire ashes, and animal fat. The instructions in this manual are unique and the process that is described is not the method your ancestors used. It is a scientifically superior process that was developed by an engineer.
  2. How to make (cast) your own lead bullets using the wheel weights off the wheels of old cars in a junkyard.
  3. How to construct a high quality bow and arrows using a knife plus the appropriate raw materials you can find in nature.
  4. How to find water and how to make that water safe to drink in a variety of different environments.
  5. How to grow food from seed and how to grow seed from that food. Once you understand this process then you can provide your own food for an unlimited number of years into the future.
  6. How to preserve food for winter consumption without electricity or food canning jars using three simple old-fashioned methods.
  7. How to build a safe temporary shelter to protect your family from the weather and from predatory wild animals. This is not the type of shelter that is described in wilderness survival manuals.
  8. How to build an underground log cabin for long-term survival if the need should arise. It is easy to find information on how to build a traditional underground home but this manual explains the best way to use pine logs to build an underground "cabin cave."
The information in this reference manual is timeless. This manual explains how to survive hard times during four separate phases:
  1. Short-term of two-weeks to four-weeks.
  2. Medium-term of six-months to one-year.
  3. Long-term of ten to twenty-years.
  4. Eternity with God in heaven.
It would be a shame if a person survived very difficult times and lived to be 100 years old and then woke up one morning in hell. This book includes a special section on spiritual issues to assist a person prepare his or her entire family for eternity and not just the next few years.

This high quality reference manual is a true bargain at its current price.


Preface to
How to Survive and Thrive During Hard Times

This book contains suggestions and alternatives for you to consider so you can make the best possible choices for the continued comfort and survival of your family during hard times.

The book will not tell you exactly what you should do. This book does not assume to know your family's specific circumstances, or what skills and abilities you and your family members possess, or what special needs you or your family members require. Only you know the answers to these questions and therefore only you can strategically customize a strategy that would have the maximum chance of being successful for you and your family.

If you are looking for a book that makes specific recommendations about exactly where you should live, and exactly what foods and other items you should buy, and the exact type of firearms and ammunition you should purchase, then this is not that book. If that is the type of advice you are seeking then there are a multitude of books that have been written on this topic by a variety of other authors who do know exactly what you should be doing. You should purchase one of those other books instead of this one.

This book assumes you are an intelligent individual who is capable of making your own decisions. It assumes you simply want to know what the current options and alternatives are, along with the specific advantages and disadvantages of each alternative. Once you have all this information in your possession then you know you can make the best choice about which options would be the most logical for your family's long-term survival during hard times. The author of this book cannot make that decision for you. That is a decision you will need to make for your own family based on your intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of your family unit.

This book will provide you with a variety of options to consider in the areas of water and food procurement, gardening options, personal hygiene alternatives, practical battery operated electronic equipment, practical information on the importance of fire, a reasonable summary of the relevant issues related to firearm selection, how to make your own ammunition at home, a common sense discussion of the pros and cons of a variety of different long-term survival strategies, some spiritual encouragement, and some recommendations for your family's continued education and entertainment.

If the above is the type of information you believe would be useful to you then this book might be a practical addition to your home library. However, this is not a stand-alone reference book. This book presents a concise clear overview about a wide variety of different topics but it does not go into extensive depth in every topic area. You will need to acquire a book written exclusively about a specific topic if you decide you wish to know more about that subject. For example, this book contains a very good explanation of how to use commercial quality steel traps to capture wild game animals for food. But if you decide you want to know more about the trapping profession then you will need to purchase a book written exclusively on the topic of trapping, or you will need to download the recommended "State of Michigan Trapper's Instruction Manual" from their web site as explained in the Trapping Chapter in this book.

If you are seriously considering the purchase of this book then I strongly recommend that you examine the Table of Contents of this book and read the list of topics that are discussed in this book. If the topics are ones you are specifically interested in then this book might be worthy of a place in your home library.

Please let me explain why I believe I am qualified to write a book such as this one. To begin with, I am not one of those people who simply writes about hard times and who has never really experienced hard times. I spent approximately six-months living deep in the backwoods of Maine with my wife and our three small preschool age children from June to November of 1975 while I was building a rustic log cabin using pine trees that grew on the 12 acres of land we had purchased. I wore a pistol every day while I was building our cabin in that primitive wilderness environment. I hunted with a bolt-action rifle and I used steel traps to capture wild game animals. We cooked our meals over a campfire every day. After returning to "civilization" in late November of 1975 I continued to study about pioneer life and hard times survival. During the past thirty-five years I have personally tested a wide variety of "textbook procedures" and I have discovered which ones are truly reliable and which ones are almost completely worthless from a practical perspective. Therefore I have accumulated a tremendous amount of practical hands-on knowledge and experience on this topic. And it has all been tempered by my actual experience of living a primitive existence in the backwoods of Maine during the summer and fall of 1975.

My primary objective for the past 35 years has been to discover practical reliable methods that could be used in a long-term survival situation when a family did not have the option to conveniently replenish their supplies on a regular basis.

The chapters in this book were not simply copied from another source. Although some of the information in this book can be found elsewhere, most of the information in each of the chapters is from my own personal files and it is based on my own personal life experiences.

One of the advantages of receiving hard times survival instruction from an old man is that he no longer has the desire to prove that he can survive on a day-to-day basis with nothing more than a good knife, a good rifle, and the will to survive. An old man more fully appreciates the comforts of civilization and the advantages of modern technology. Therefore he will employ as much of that technology as is reasonably possible to make the living conditions for his family as enjoyable as possible. If this is also your objective then this book might help you to achieve your goal.

Respectfully,
Grandpappy
July 1, 2011


Table of Contents

Note: If you click on the underlined title of any chapter then you can read that chapter for free on my web site.

If a chapter title is not underlined then that means the chapter either:
1. contains new information that is not on my web site, or
2. contains information that was consilidated and summarized from a variety of different pages on my web site into one chapter about that specific topic.

Chapter Page
Section One: Introduction
1A Simultaneous Worldwide Depression, and a Worldwide Famine, and World War III 1
2 A List of 20 Common Mistakes That Should Be Avoided 7
Section Two: Basic Survival
3 Why Prepare for Something That May Never Happen? 11
4 Realistic Self-Sufficiency 13
5 A Simple But Effective Survival Plan 17
6 How to Start Preparing for Hard Times on a Very Modest Budget 21
Section Three: Water
7 How to Build a Very Effective Water Filter System for Approximately $75 31
8 How to Find Water and How to Make Water Safe to Drink 33
Section Four: Food
9 Introduction to Emergency Food Storage 53
10 30-Day Emergency Food Supply 63
11 One-Year Emergency Food Supply 69
12 Some Practical Places Where You Can Store and Hide Your Emergency Food 71
13 Some Simple Options for Heating Canned Foods 77
14 Cast Iron Cookware 79
15 Pure Salt, Table Salt, and Sea Salt 87
16 Black Pepper, Peppercorns, and Peppercorn Grinders 89
17 Coffee, Coffee Pots, and Coffee Grinders 91
18 Meat Grinder 95
19 Wheat Grinder: Hand Crank and Electric 97
Section Five: Gardening
20 During Hard Times Should You Know Some Basic Gardening Skills 99
21 Vegetable Recommendations for New Gardeners 101
22 How to Grow Each Type of Vegetable and Each Type of Vegetable Seed 107
23 How to Harvest, Process, and Store Vegetable Seeds 115
24 How to Grow Fruits, Nuts, Grapes, and Berries 119
25 How to Grow Fruit Trees From Seed 129
26 How to Preserve Food Using Three Simple Old Fashioned Methods 133
27 How to Convert Human Waste into a Safe Garden Compost Fertilizer 139
28 The Advantages of Mulch in a Garden 143
29 Ant Hills: A Simple Solution 145
Section Six: Shelter
30 Use Common Sense to Compare Your Current Location to Another Location 147
31 How to Select the Optimal Retreat Location 151
32 The Advantages and Disadvantages of Recreational Vehicles and Campers 155
33 How to Build a Safe Temporary Shelter 159
34 Grandpappy's Wilderness Cabin Cave 167
Section Seven: Clothing and Shoes
35 Clothing 177
36 Shoes and Boots 183
Section Eight: Personal Hygiene
37 Personal Hygiene Items 185
38 Toilet Tissue 187
Section Nine: Emergency First Aid and Home Remedies
39 Emergency First Aid 191
40 Aspirin 195
41 Herbal Home Remedies 199
42 Colloidal Silver 201
43 Home Remedies for Insect Stings, Ticks, Chiggers, Head Lice, and Skunk Deodorizer 203
Section Ten: Electronics
44 Rechargeable NiMH Batteries and a Solar Battery Charger 209
45 Flashlights 217
46 Emerson AM/FM Instant Weather Portable Radio 219
47 Grundig "Eton" S350DL Deluxe AM/FM/Shortwave Radio 221
48 Grundig "Eton" G6 Buzz Aldrin AM/FM/Aircraft/Shortwave Portable Radio 223
49 The Basics of Shortwave Radio 225
50 Cell Phones, Satellite Phones, and Two-Way Radios 227
51 The Basics of Solar Power and How to Build a Portable Solar Power Generator 231
Section Eleven: Basic Skills
52 How to Build a Safe Fire and Why Fire Is So Important 237
53 How to Start an Emergency Fire Using the Gunpowder from a Bullet 241
54 How to Build a Simple Sundial 243
55 Grandpappy's Homemade Soap Recipe 245
56 Other Basic Skills: How to Make Charcoal and How to Make Maple Syrup 257
Section Twelve: Firearms
57Self-Defense 259
58 Should You Own a Firearm? 261
59 Should You Have a Concealed Carry Firearm License? 265
60Firearm Safety Rules 266
61 Bolt-Action Rifle or Semi-Auto Rifle? 267
62 How to Hit the Target Bull's-Eye 275
63 Should You Install a Laser Sight on Your Firearm? 301
64 Cost Comparison: Factory-Loaded Ammunition and Hand-Reloaded Ammunition 307
65 How to Make Your Own Ammunition 309
66 Pellet Rifles: 22 Caliber and 177 Caliber 335
Section Thirteen: Hard Times Survival
67 An Emergency Backpack or Bug-Out-Bag (B.O.B.) 339
68 Bicycles for Emergency Transportation 343
69 Basic Hand Tools 353
70 Firewood, Fireplaces, and Cast Iron Stoves 355
71 Charity During Hard Times 363
72 Pets and Livestock 367
Section Fourteen: Wilderness Survival
73 The Three Most Important Wilderness Survival Items 371
74 Compass Instructions and Alternatives 375
75 Homemade Bow and Arrows 381
76 How to Catch Wild Game Using Professional Quality Snares and Steel Traps 385
77 Gill Nets: The Easy, Efficient Way to Catch Fish 391
Section Fifteen: Social Breakdown
78 Are You Prepared for a Worst Case Breakdown in Society? 399
79 The Basic Rules of Survival During Hard Times 407
Section Sixteen: Spiritual
80 During Hard Times Will You Accept God's Help? 417
81 The Reasons I Decided to Become a Christian 419
82 How to Become a Christian 427
83 Is Salvation by Faith Alone or is Something More Required? 431
84 The Rapture 437
85 What Does the Bible Say About Alcohol? 441
86 What Does the Bible Say About Giving? 447
Section Seventeen: Education and Entertainment
87 Recommended Schoolbooks for the Education of the Ones You Love 457
88 Recommended Books for Hard Times Survival 461
89 Paperback Novels for Entertainment 465
90 Music for Entertainment 467
91 A Deck of 52 Playing Cards and Some Card Game Books and Five Ordinary Dice 469
Section Eighteen: Conclusion
92 What to Do Right Now if the Hard Times Have Begun and You are Not Prepared 471
Index 487
About the Author 492

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