Les Stroud's "Will to Live" Book Review
One day as I was driving home from work, I decided to stop by a local bookstore and purchase a survival book. I really like Les Stroud and his TV Show Survivorman, and I had not read his book, "Will to Live," so I decided this would be the book for me.
Now I used to be a voracious reader, however over the last eight years, my work schedule has pretty much taken away any desire to read books. I'm just too busy and find it really hard to stick with a book to the end. I was a little hesitant to get this book, but figured i would give it a shot.
I can honestly say that I was not surprised by the quality of this book. While it did take me several weeks to make my way through it, my actual sitting time was only a few sessions over a three week time period. I really enjoyed his format of this book where he details several real life survival situations and he critics their decision making process along the way. It is not laid out in as a novel or as an historical narrative, rather he examines the events that put these people in their survival situation and details what they went through along the way and he finishes each chapter with sharing the outcome of each one. As he's telling you the story, he will actually stop the story and interject his beliefs into the situation. Sometimes he agrees with the decisions and other times he disagrees, so I really enjoyed having his input added to each of these stories. This format really puts it into a Case Study/Teaching method of writing.
Unless you are familiar with the story in itself, you never really know what the outcome is going to be until the last few paragraphs. Sometimes they make it out alive and other times they do not. Each chapter kept my attention with his really nice writing style and interesting format and it was hard to put the book down until I had finished the chapter.
Once the chapter is finished, he then rates the the factors they had going for them or against them in a little chart. Also throughout the stories, he peppered the book with sidebars to give you some more detailed survival teachings, which I found really useful. For example, if he disagreed with a decision a person made, not only would he tell you why he disagreed with the decision, but then he would provide a sidebar that would explain the proper way or the way he would have done it.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Les Stroud or Wilderness Self Reliance or Survival Skills. The stories include jungle survival to stranded in a life boat to surviving the Arctic and Antarctic regions, so you get a good feel for the different types of scenarios that real people have actually faced. A key lesson that I walked away from with this book, is that a real survival situation just plain sucks and you need to be prepared ahead of time on how to properly survive. Yes you can survive without any skills but I do not want to solely risk my life on my own Will to Live.
Now I used to be a voracious reader, however over the last eight years, my work schedule has pretty much taken away any desire to read books. I'm just too busy and find it really hard to stick with a book to the end. I was a little hesitant to get this book, but figured i would give it a shot.
I can honestly say that I was not surprised by the quality of this book. While it did take me several weeks to make my way through it, my actual sitting time was only a few sessions over a three week time period. I really enjoyed his format of this book where he details several real life survival situations and he critics their decision making process along the way. It is not laid out in as a novel or as an historical narrative, rather he examines the events that put these people in their survival situation and details what they went through along the way and he finishes each chapter with sharing the outcome of each one. As he's telling you the story, he will actually stop the story and interject his beliefs into the situation. Sometimes he agrees with the decisions and other times he disagrees, so I really enjoyed having his input added to each of these stories. This format really puts it into a Case Study/Teaching method of writing.
Unless you are familiar with the story in itself, you never really know what the outcome is going to be until the last few paragraphs. Sometimes they make it out alive and other times they do not. Each chapter kept my attention with his really nice writing style and interesting format and it was hard to put the book down until I had finished the chapter.
Once the chapter is finished, he then rates the the factors they had going for them or against them in a little chart. Also throughout the stories, he peppered the book with sidebars to give you some more detailed survival teachings, which I found really useful. For example, if he disagreed with a decision a person made, not only would he tell you why he disagreed with the decision, but then he would provide a sidebar that would explain the proper way or the way he would have done it.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Les Stroud or Wilderness Self Reliance or Survival Skills. The stories include jungle survival to stranded in a life boat to surviving the Arctic and Antarctic regions, so you get a good feel for the different types of scenarios that real people have actually faced. A key lesson that I walked away from with this book, is that a real survival situation just plain sucks and you need to be prepared ahead of time on how to properly survive. Yes you can survive without any skills but I do not want to solely risk my life on my own Will to Live.
Posted by The Outdoor Podcast at 12/14/2011 9:54 PM 
Categories: Self Reliance & Survival Skills
Tags: Les Stroud survivorman survivorman book Will to Live book will to live survive survival stories
Categories: Self Reliance & Survival Skills
Tags: Les Stroud survivorman survivorman book Will to Live book will to live survive survival stories
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