Books: Forrest Griffin and Sam Sheridan Double Double Feature (Part 1 - On Doomsday Prepping)

In a strange bit of synchronicity, author/fighter Sam Sheridan and fighter/author Forrest Griffin have each written a bestselling book on fighting and a bestselling book on surviving the apocalypse, so I thought it'd be fun to review all of them.

The second pair of books are about preparing for the End of Days:

The Disaster Diaries, by Sam Sheridan

Author Sam Sheridan chronicled his experiences learning survival skills with all sorts of subject matter experts in "The Disaster Diaries." From the obvious (defensive shooting with Tiger McKee and primitive survival with Cody Lundin) to the esoteric (boosting cars with an ex-gang member and stunt driving with Rick Seaman), each chapter deals with stuff you'll probably need to know in a grid-down, end-of-the-world type situation...or even just your garden-variety hurricane or earthquake.

Speaking as someone who has taken classes in shooting and wilderness survival and reported on them in this very blog, "The Disaster Diaries" reads like the world's best after-action report. While it isn't a how-to manual and certainly won't replace real training, Sheridan does a fine job of giving the reader an idea of what to expect in the kinds of courses he writes about. His training vignettes are interwoven with a post-apocalyptic frame story that feels contrived at first, but gets better as the book goes on; I wonder if he'll ever try his hand at fiction.

Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down: A Survival Guide to the Apocalypse, by Forrest Griffin and Erich Krauss

Forrest Griffin and co-writer Erich Krauss's first book, "Got Fight?" was crudely humorous, but also fairly well-rooted in Griffin's life as a pro MMA fighter. Their second book, "Be Ready When the Sh*t Goes Down," ups the humor (just look at the cover) but unfortunately loses many of the biographical bits that made the first one more than a joke.

The book cycles through some of the same stuff Sheridan's did - Forrest and Erich recognize that skills like shooting, driving, wilderness skills, and hunting will all be critical in a SHTF situation, and there are some accurate nuggets of information scattered throughout the book. The problem is that there's a lot of juvenile fluff obscuring that information, including a lengthy-and-sorta-useless manliness "test" at the front. The signal-to-noise ratio is such that I can't recommend the book to anyone but the most hardcore Griffin fans who want to have some yuks on a long flight.