Review: Don't Forget the Can Opener
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 1, 2013
Jeff and Jeannie are a professional couple who live in a high rise apartment in a big city. Their apartment is devoid of any food, which isn't surprising since they also don't own any pots, pans, or anything else resembling a cooking implement. They don't even use dishes, but rely on paper plates and bowls to avoid having to wash dishes. Unbelievable as it may seem, they eat out, order in, or take out food for every meal, every day, in blissful ignorance of how to do anything for themselves.That is, until Jeannie happens to see a headline on a news website about the importance of being prepared for emergencies by having enough food on hand for several days. Over the next several days it becomes an obsession. When she mentions it to her husband, he thinks she's overreacting and scoffs. Then while at work, Jeff overhears an conversation between two co-workers about preparedness and begins to think that Jeannie isn't too off base after all. The two start doing online research into various aspects of preparedness and buying supplies without telling the other what they're up to.Then a real emergency hits. Have they prepared enough? Do they have any idea what needs to be done or how to do it? Can the small things they've managed to do so far be enough to allow them to survive?While the emergency portrayed in the book is a lot more extreme than most of us will realistically face and the preparations the characters make are more simple than what one would need to do in real life, the message is still valid. As hard as it is to believe, there are people in the country who start out as clueless as the main characters and are totally unprepared for something as simple as an extended power outage or storm.If this story motivates a few more people to make sensible preparations for emergencies or to motivate friends to do so, it's worth the time it takes to read this book.One note to the author: Please try to tone down your overuse of exclamation points. It's a case of less is more; only use them for emphasis, not for ordinary conversations or they lose their impact.