This book won’t save your life despite the bold claims on its cover. This book won’t even give you many tips on how to survive WSHTF (the survivalist acronym for When Shit Hits The Fan, according to the book). What this book will give you is an insight into the mid-life crisis of a fashionable Los Angeles author and his transformation into “a man.”

Neil Strauss is best known for his book covering the seduction and the “pick-up” scene entitled The Game. It was published in 2005. (During that time Strauss went on a long trail of TV appearances discussing The Game and pick-up stuff. You can easily find them on YouTube.) Before The Game, he mainly ghostwrote autobiographies for ultra-famous, troubled alt-stars like Marilyn Manson, Jenna Jameson, and Dave Navarro.

Emergency starts off by following Strauss around trying to cover a series of “Death-Cults” on the eve of the big fat Y2K scam. Instead of staying with one of these cults for New Year’s, he goes and parties at the White House with some friends. But his obsession with or interest in these apocalyptic cults didn’t end here.

Strauss prefaces his journey into the world of survivalists by telling us how he learned to fear death at nine or ten and then by telling us that (at thirty) he is learning to fear the death of America. That’s where the spark for the following 350 pages comes: he’s afraid of the apocalypse, and quickly becomes obsessed with becoming the sole survivor in the face of it. He calls this way of thinking about and preparing for the future “apocalypse eyes.”

Strauss’ main fault as a writer is the structure and style of his writing: he uses a formula where he switches gears between descriptive writing and incredibly sentimental writing. He’ll be describing his gun training and some wisdom that his instructor shouted at him, and then a page later, he will begin a rant on a topic like life/death or the course of human civilization over the past thousand or so years:

Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins? That’s how the world looks through apocalypse eyes.

If you’re Neil Strauss, it’s going to be hard for you to discuss modern America and the death of Ancient civilizations without dragging in Nazi Germany. And if you’re Neil Strauss, what’s the most obvious way to make this transition? Easy: a flashback to sixth grader Neil Strauss:

During the second week of class, Mrs. Kaufman drew a timeline on the board. It began in 1933, with Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor and the boycotting of Jewish professional services. Below the year 1935, she wrote “The Nuremberg Laws,” which stripped the Jews of their citizenship. Now she was at 1938. “Jewish passports stamped with J,” she wrote. As the class clown, it was my duty to come up with a joke response to every question. But instead, I listened transfixed, imagining myself suffering each successive indignity.

Damn good memory for a sixth grader. Anyway, the young Neil Strauss, a “small, funny kid who was bad at sports, awkward around girls, and fell over easily when pushed, especially when carrying books,” asks the teacher: “Why did they stay?” And off we go after Strauss’ first survival priority: find a way, When Shit Hits The Fan, to get out of the country when everyone else is stopped from leaving. This means get dual citizenship. Because when history repeats itself, America, like Nazi Germany, will seal off its borders, seal in its citizens, and chaos and genocide will follow.

(Note: Godwin’s law states that “As [a] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Basically, the longer you argue a point, and the more you stretch a thread of logic, the greater the chances of you involving the Nazis in some way. And once you make that jump to Nazis, Hitler, or the Holocaust, generally your argument has jumped, flailing off into the deep end. While reading, I remembered the scene in Office Space where Peter and Joanna are in the car and she’s telling him about the “flair” she’s being hassled about at work. Then Peter brings up Nazis: “You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear.”)

A startled Strauss starts trying to find ways to save himself when America starts to become a fascist state and society goes every-man-for-himself. He joins the world of Runners: People (mainly million-and-billionaires) trying to find ways to run from the government and, especially, evade its tax laws. His first idea is to get a second passport. Around the same time, after talking to his multi-billionaire friend Spencer, he finds ways to hide his assets from the Government. He goes to a lawyer/financial adviser and gets on board with a plan to split up his assets among several limited liability corporations and then hide their ownership overseas, leaving him tax-free and lawsuit-proof. Then he finds out about the Sovereign Society, and attends one of their meetings in Mexico. He sits through discussions about hiding financial transactions from the IRS and the heavy hand of the U.S. government while the reader sits through Strauss’ attempts to rationalize his quickly increasing level of paranoia:

Though paranoia is often used as a derogatory term, the truth is that it’s a survivalist instinct. If you think your postman is stealing your checks or your nurse is poisoning your food, even if it’s not true, the accusation is rooted in an innate desire for self-preservation. When a cat perks up its ears or hides under a bed when a completely harmless stranger approaches, it’s the exact same response, developed through millennia spent living in the wild, where the unknown is the threat.

During all this tax-evasion stuff, he runs across a man named Windell Lawrence who tells him about a small country located on a tiny Caribbean island named St. Kitts and Nevis. Unlike most other countries with strict and expensive citizenship requirements (generally huge, non-refundable investments) all St. Kitts required was real-estate ownership. So Strauss hires a grumpy, overworked lawyer to handle his real-estate purchase and citizenship. He’s starting to feel safer, but then has second thoughts:

And what was it all for? Symbolic paper, which is just a teeny little booklet that means nothing to the universe. Realistically, the world wasn’t likely to end in my lifetime. And if it did, everyone on St. Kitts would be just as dead as everyone in America. If there were a smaller-scale world disaster, things would probably be even worse on an island in the Caribbean, where I was more likely to be a victim of food shortages, droughts, hurricanes, blackouts, and tsunamis. There’s nowhere to turn and hide on an island — especially one in the smallest country in the Americas.

After a little bit of waiting around, Strauss’ lawyer helps him get an apartment in St. Kitts and he goes to stay there for a few days. During this visit we find out, from an excerpt in Strauss’ diary, that there was a power outage in St. Kitts. He feels helpless and scared. And realizes that not only is he an outsider on St. Kitts, but he is on a remote island that has a huge poverty gap. This starts the second part of Strauss’ journey: learn to fend for himself.

The book follows the same formula established so far: do something, briefly describe it, then rant and philosophize. So I’ll make describing the next several hundred pages easy: he learns to handle Guns like a pro at an Arizona-based weapons training camp called Gunsite. He learns to survive in the wild at Tom Brown, Jr.’s Tracker School. He learns to handle, use, and do basically anything with a knife from Kevin “Mad Dog” McClung. (There is an unusually well-written and plain cool section here, where Strauss and Mad Dog kill, skin and gut a goat with a knife while Strauss’ girlfriend is wincing in the truck.) He learns which wild plants to eat and which will kill you from Christopher Nyerges at the School of Self-Reliance. Throughout all of this the reader is given very few actual survival tips, a lot of commentary, opinion, reflection on culture/society, and basically filler.

Through this part of his transformation, we see him go from a wimpy, small guy, into a man who can wield a knife like a pro, make fire from nothing, shoot a pig’s heart out at 50 yards in less than 3 seconds, and mate with his girlfriend.  Several times. After him and Mad Dog kill a goat, he reflects: “It was the manliest day of my life. Even the day I lost my virginity didn’t feel nearly this masculine.” But don’t get him all wrong, because all this training still culminates into the date-night of the millennium.

Strauss sets up a training scenario where he is randomly without power or water. He is testing out how prepared he is and how he needs to improve his provisions. Part-way into it, his girlfriend Katie, a fussy, fearful, girly-girl comes home, but quickly leaves when she finds out that there is no running water or electricity. Later, Katie and her friend come back to the house and find that Strauss is out-back cooking and getting dinner ready:

“Romantic,” Kendra says when she sees the house. Katie smiles. I can see this makes her more comfortable staying here. Maybe, instead of calling everything primitive, I can just call it romantic and get her more involved. Camping can be a romantic trip for two under the stars. Shooting guns can be a romantic fireworks display. Skinning an animal can be a romantic trip to the mall for a new coat.

While Neil is cooking up the catfish around the fire, Katie and her friend are watching the stars and have a little time for some girl-talk: “‘This is like the perfect Friday night,’ Kendra tells Katie. ‘You’re so lucky. I have to stop dating these club losers and find a real man.’” Kendra goes home, but this time Katie stays. The following two days are filled with romantic, survivalist mini-dates. At one point Strauss jumps over his fence into the neighbor’s yard to get some water from the pool. Katie is his lookout. “Afterward, Katie and I make love on the couch. It’s the sixth time we’ve done it since last night. I could get used to this.” Later that night Katie wants to make s’mores. I think you get the picture. But that’s not the end of the story.

Strauss starts going to Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) meetings. He’s working on a tip from a survivalist message board that told him if he got a CERT vest and hat, then in the event of an emergency, he might have a better chance of getting through a police or government roadblock or heavy traffic. (Since he would be seen as one of the “good guys.”) But as he sits through the courses he starts to sign onto the philosophy of CERT: When Shit Hits The Fan, the government won’t be able to help anyone for a few days. So the community will need to be there to help itself. Basically, some people will step up to the challenge of helping the community instead of everybody fighting, stealing from and killing each other in the event of a crisis. He becomes an EMT and begins helping people in emergency situations, as opposed to running from them. That’s the only real lesson in this book. Groups will always outlast lone individuals no matter how much survival training they’ve had.

This book won’t save your life. You probably won’t even learn anything about survival. Emergency is more for Neil Strauss than for its readers. It’s a document of his transformation into a “real” man. A manual on how to stop worrying about the impending doom of our civilization and start stepping up to the challenge. There’s always going to be some unstoppable apocalyptic event on the horizon. But if you let the bullshit get to you, it’s time to die … because you aren’t really living.