The Prepper's Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Short version: Congrats! If you're considering this book it means you've realized that you need to get your shite together, and this book is a great place for you to start. I bought my copy in 2014 and have given several as gifts. It's the only preparedness book I've ever given as a gift. I came back here to look for a Kindle version (just for convenience) as I want to go through the book again and fill in any weak spots in my plans. You should buy it. Long version: The world is a very different place than it was when I first bought this book in 2014. The pandemic, hurricanes, droughts, ice storms, etc, and now even possibly a world war have opened people's eyes to the necessity of becoming more self reliant. This book walks you through step by step, preparing you for whatever natural disasters are most likely to occur in your corner of the universe, as well as any man made calamities that might be thrown our way. You can go through the book and follow her steps 1 week at a time or go at your own pace. My advice is to go as quickly as you can financially afford to go, given the state of things currently. As another reviewer mentions, the author has a great website. I agree with their advice to check out the website first, and buy the book if you like what you see. (Assume some day the interwebs might fail you and get a physical version of any resource you might have to rely upon. (See? already you're prepping!) Over the years I've built up a pretty good library in this genre, and this book, along with the author's website, are great resources. I recommend them highly.

After several months of reading reviews on this book I was intrigued enough to make the purchase. It is a very good buy and offers a ton of information on being prepared for those things in life that most people don't prepare for. This is a hard copy (paperback) of a book of information everyone needs to know to survive any major disaster. This isn't just for an end of the world scenario but for real time, real world disasters, be it earthquakes, weather, solar flares or nuclear Armageddon. A hard copy means you won't be stuck with a dead battery on a phone or tablet that has information on it. Normal, everyday common sense should tell you that the rule of three's is what will end life as we know it. Three minutes without air, three days without potable water or three weeks without food is what will kill off mankind as we know it. Hurricane Katrina proved it on a small scale. What if the power grid fails. Pick a reason, be it a solar flair, a computer attack, a failure of equipment or whatever else causes it, the result is the same. In three days the grocery stores are empty and deliveries are not being made. You cannot access your money. Gas stations stop pumping gas when they run out or the generators fail. Three days after the food stops arriving at the Winn Dixie, the chaos begins. Although 80% of the population will expect the government to arrive and feed them and to save them, Hurricane Katrina proves that those 80% will die sitting on the curb waiting for the government to arrive or in the unrest and anarchy that comes with hunger, thirst and the need to feed your children and family. This book will help you to prepare for almost every scenario and put you in the protected class. Preparing for the governments failure to be able to save everyone is only doing what you grandparents and their parents did on a daily basis. You protect your kids, yourself and your family from the horror of a world out of control. Step back two or three generations and be as prepared as your grandparents and their parents were. This book gets you to where you need to be and helps you prepare for any possibility. Prepper means prepared. Be prepared to protect your family from whatever may happen in the future.

I like how this is written, in a logical progression for the beginning prepper (like me) to follow. I want to start by preparing for a short term emergency, and when I've done that then I'll work on prepping for a long term disaster event, and then later I'll try to get ready for one of the many possible life changing things that really do happen in the world. And that's what this book helps to do. I'm going to be going back to this resource repeatedly for a very long time. When it arrived, I was surprised at how big and heavy it is, but it's easy to read, not intimidating at all. The author has also been directly accessible for answering questions. The only negative I can say is there are numerous typographical errors (spelling, punctuation, a word missing, an extra word added), but nothing worse than you see on the major news websites, for example. I'm just nit-picking because there is nothing else bad to say about it. You can still always tell exactly what she's saying in spite of this. The beginning prepper can quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, and you can waste a lot of time. So trust me, start with this book! She could be charging double the price and I would say the same thing. This is the longest review I've ever made for any product I've bought on Amazon, and that's because it's one of the best - and most important - purchases I've ever made.

The 4 stars is subjective - I think this is a very decent help to novice preppers and the type of people who want to be aren't really "naturals" or don't quite have a prepper's mindset yet. There is some repetition among the various chapters, but that's bound to happen in a step-by-step and for some of those things a reminder isn't necessarily a bad thing. The step-by-step aspect of it is fairly solid, imo. I agree with how the author has organized things and laid out the steps. I also quite appreciate the real world examples given for each situation, because not everyone is great at imaging things that aren't in their personal experience, and also because some people just don't think (not meant as insult, some people just don't have the type of mindset for it). I took off the star partly for some of the unnecessary repetition but mostly because I felt things could have been more concise, which would help its major problem - sheer size. Some people will like the absolutely-laid-out way this approaches the subject, but I feel like many people new to prepping may be daunted by its size and/or overwhelmed by the amount of detail and info. I feel it should have been broken into at least 3 volumes, perhaps in line with what the authors calls 'layers'. For those already into the prepping mindset, I'd probably give this a 2 star rating. Really for the same reasons as above - so much repetition is not needed and caused a lot of bulk and minutia to have to slog thru. It's just too big to be that useful to those already into the subject. I did find a couple of aspects I hadn't really addressed personally, but for the most part it's pretty basic and I'm not real happy I had to spend so much time just to find a couple of tidbits.

I have been following the author's on-line posts for years. Tess Pennington has a very good series on her web site: <http://readynutrition.com/resources/52-weeks-to-preparedness-an-introduction_19072011> The series is titled "52 Weeks" and it is excellent. In order to prepare the 52 week series, Tess interviewed a lot of experts in the field; many contributed articles for the series. This book is based on that series. I recommend that you go to the web link above and check out the series. If you like what the author posted on her site, you will like this book. We never know when we may have to "get by." We just had a very large earthquake here in the S.F bay area (Napa, CA). It knocked out power and water. Many people rushed to the store to buy water and, since they had no power and couldn't cook, many families left their homes to find a place to eat. There were problems because many stores and restaurants were closed. The roads were damaged. The local news reported that the roads were jammed. The earthquake left some homes uninhabitable. The news reported that the people who were unable to return to their homes had no idea what to do. They evidently hadn't given it much thought until the earthquake left them homeless. Flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes: bad things can happen to anyone. Tess Pennington's book will help you be prepared. As I said, Tess provides all the information for free on her web site. That is very unusual. Most preparedness sites charge a lot of money for the information they provide. Although I have already read all of the information on her website, I felt this book would be a wonderful addition to my library. It also makes a great gift. I do want to note that "The Prepper's Blueprint" isn't a slick polished book. There are no glossy pictures and some readers might criticize the writing style. None of that matters to me. I believe this is one of the best, well thought out books on the market. Tess has covered every facet of preparedness and I believe the book is both thought-provoking and well worth the cost.

Being completely new to the topic, this book was invaluable as a starter resource. Other reviewers have criticized it as a 'book of lists' but that is exactly what I, as a newbie to preparedness (I hate the term "prepper" because of the connotations associated with it), needed to get started. I have more advanced reference materials now, but I occasionally find myself referencing it when I need a refresher on the basics. If you are someone who has been engaging in preparedness for you or your family for a while, I do not recommend this book. If, however, you are a novice like I was then I strongly recommend it -- it was well worth the cost and, if nothing else, you have a group of lists that is well researched and will save you the 100,000 websites out there that claim to have "the" list that you need. And, years later, I've started using the book as a place to consolidate printed pages and non-book materials to keep them with their associated category.

This is certainly the finest prepping book I've ever read. I'm an engineer and a friend said once that If you know everything that's in Marks' Engineering Handbook (a seminal mechanical eng. book), you'd be the smartest person in the world. I say, if you know everything that is in The Prepper's Blueprint, you will be the smartest person in the world. This a substantial book, physically and informationally, yet it's so easy to read. I feel like I could spend a decade following all of her links and probably should, but she gives you all the info you need and summarizes a chapter with Preps to Buy and Action Item lists that are invaluable. I'll bet you a truckload of toilet paper that you will find this the most useful prepping book you've ever bought. Really. I want to bet you. Now. : ) I ordered it yesterday and it arrived today. I'd give it six stars if I could. (Full disclosure, I have no connection whatsoever to the author except my gratitude for writing it) Good luck and happy prepping!

I was on a prepping website and it recommended this book as one of the must haves. I have ordered other so called must haves, and after receiving them thinking they had very poor expectations of must haves. For this one they sure got it right. It is very thorough in all aspects of it's content. A lot of these kind of books that are published are just mostly common sense type stuff that I can not believe people have to be instructed/educated on. I have to say I have learned a lot of things in each chapter that I had not thought about before. I am still only about half way through it as far as actually reading it. The chapters build a base on subjects and then come back with more advanced info later in the book, all in mostly successive order. It is the best one of these kind of books that I have found. It will give you a good basic understanding of prepping without getting overwhelmed.