Hey YouTube, this is Prax Prep. And today I want to talk about what I think is one of the best post-collapse fiction books out there that I think most people kind of forget is a post-collapse fiction book. It's a hugely popular genre at the moment. There's plenty of books and films and television shows coming out about the collapse of civilization. I just had to go briefly down to my library and I pulled out a bunch of books just as other examples. Obviously, Cornmark McCarthy is the road. A little bit more fun world-worthy. A little older, the postman. Yeah, kind of reflecting, can't see it too much. This is the postman. And this is a book back from the 1950s, I am Legend. If you've ever seen the film I am Legend, you'd be surprised when you read the book that it's to find out that it's actually not about zombies, it's about vampires in the book. But it's still basically the same story. Somebody trying to survive in that difficult environment. The book I want to talk about today, though, is one I'm sure you've heard of before. It's a classic and it's The Grades of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This is a beautifully written book. Steinbeck is really going out on a limb here. I think Steinbeck is a great writer. He's one of my favorite writers. He sets the scene so well and his descriptions of the place and the time, I think, is just really wonderful. It opens with the passage about a rain, I think, falling on the landscape and things being really dry and it's just, it's a wonderful, wonderful book. And it is about an economic collapse that people are going through. People are having trouble finding work to sustain themselves, to having trouble getting food into their own mouths and the mouths of their family members. And it's a really cautionary tale, I think, about what things can be like when the economy turns bad and that's obviously one thing that a lot of us prep against. Now, there's one section in here in particular that always really hits me right in the gut. And I'm just going to read this is one section here. This is towards the end of chapter 16. Again, like I said, all the people in this book are trying to find work, they're trying to sustain themselves and feed their families. And this is a story of a man that had failed at doing that. And there's just one paragraph that I'll read. The ragged man drew himself up. I tried to tell you folks, he said, something that took me a year to find out. It took two dead kids. It took my wife dead to show me. But I can't tell you, I should have known that. Nobody could tell me either. I can't tell you about them. Little fella is lying in the tent with their bellies puffed out. He's talking about his kids here. With their bellies puffed out and just skin on their bones and shivering and whimpering like pops and me running around trying to get work, not for money, not for wages, he shouted. Jesus Christ just for a cup of flour and a spoon of lard. And then the coroner came. Then children died a heart failure, he said. He put it on his paper, shivering they were, and their bellies were stuck out like a pig bladder. That passage always really just hits me right in the gut. And I think it gets to the core of why I think a lot of us are preppers is because we don't want to have to feel that sense of failure if we fail our families, if we fail, especially our children in that way. Just imagining what it must have felt like for that character. I mean, it's a pretend character, but there's plenty of people in the world that have gone through this and are currently going through this. The idea of looking down at your children and not being able to provide for them in the way that you know that you should watching your children starve to death in that way. I think it's just horrible. And that's what one of the big reasons I think a lot of us are into prepping this because we don't want to have to be confronted with that situation at some day. We don't want to have to feel like the man in this book that completely failed his family. What are some other books you think really hit that home? Books that are about the idea of collapse and survival, but you know they're not zombie books or alien invasion books. Books that maybe get overlooked for their importance about reminding us about the importance of being prepared for things and how fragile a lot of the aspects of our lives can really be. That's it. I'd love to hear your comments below if there are any books you think that other people should be aware of. That would maybe maybe light a fire under people's butt before it's too late because it's uncomfortable to think about these things, but it's even more uncomfortable to go through them. That's it. Thanks for watching.