Review: Not Even Close To Expectations
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2014
**sigh**  I thought this was going to be a sequel to the first book...you know, with Dave, Sue, Zeb (Sergeant/LT) and the rest of the boys and how they continued to survive.  Not so...well, at least I don't think so, because I only made it to 15% on my Kindle before letting this one go into the archives.Joe is in a plane. Joe's plane gets hit with a surface to air missle...kind of.  Joe's plane is going down, so Joe bails out with a parachute and professionally drifts to earth.  Really?  Where did Joe the dirt farmer learn how to parachute from a plane?  Did I miss something in the first book?  Or was this just a convenient episode of excitement to entice the reader to "read on."  Oh wait...I know now.  Joe had to jump out of a burning plane and land in the middle of nowhere to set up the entire scenario for the sequel.  And then the survival lessons begin.An entire chapter (47 pages at my settings on Kindle) on how to build a fire using just the right kind of wood and a bow drill.  Okay, got through that, albeit, over a bit of fast skimming of pages and went straight into discovering clay.  From there, Joe tells us in-depth on how to make clay jars in the wilderness and preparing just the right temperature of fire in an open wilderness setting, while also making a 'wilderness' kiln to dry the pottery jars Joe just taught us how to make.  That was another chapter.And then, Joe was getting thirsty...parched thirsty.  But oh no, he doesn't dare drink from the running stream due to some kind of deer virus from feces that could make a person never be able to absorb water again.  (roll-eyes)  Nope...Joe had to finish making his pottery jars, kiln dry them and then carry them to the stream, fill them with water, carry them back to his fire and boil the water inside the jars before he dared drink any of the water.  Snicker, snicker...Joe is getting hungry.  Joe finds some berries to eat, but not too many he says.  Too much will make a person wish they hadn't eaten so many.  So, Joe then takes the reader into the next chapter of snaring rabbits and all about setting the snares up to catch said little bunny.  He gets three of em...and eats like a king.  (still rolling eyes)Okay...I'm stopping right here.  No since in going any further.  I've had my rant.I truly thought, from the discription and this book being a sequel, that it was going to be an ongoing adventure of survival with many of the same characters of the first book.  I mean, that's what a sequel normally involves.  Not so in this book, and I feel a bit duped.  This is a book about how the author is depicting how knowlegeable he is about living off the land, surviving in the wilderness and being able to do all these neat survival things...but using Joe as the method and character to present his knowledge base.  The author should have just written a survival book and stated exactly what it was instead of disguising it as a sequel and using Joe as his conveyance to present his thirty years or so experience.If I had wanted to read a wilderness survival novel/book or expose` on how to do things with just a knife, that's what I would have bought.  Be careful on this one.