98.6 Degrees

Lundin is the barefoot, dreadlocked counterpoint to the camo-and-tactical-knife survival crowd, and his book is the breath of fresh mountain air the genre desperately needs. He cuts straight through the gear-fetish nonsense and asks the only question that matters in the first 72 hours: are you holding your core temperature? Hypothermia and hyperthermia kill faster than anything else, and Lundin will not let you forget it. The writing is funny, irreverent, and dense with practical truth. Jim particularly loves the breakdown of what actually goes in a real-world survival kit (hint: most of what you've been told is wrong) and the no-nonsense chapter on the psychology of "this isn't happening to me." Lundin's "Universal Edibility Test" debunking is worth the cover price by itself. At 200 pages this is the survival book you can actually read cover-to-cover in a weekend, and it'll reshape how you think about the gear in your trunk and the bag in your closet. Five worms. Jim's gateway book into the survival genre, and still one of his favorites.