Disaster Diaries is in stores now….

FRAT WARNING:

“Sheridan is a charming storyteller, and his prose is both thoughtful and playful… everything he has learned has not made him paranoid and believing that the end of the world is nigh; instead, it’s given him the confidence to face anything… An upbeat and entertaining survival guide for the end of the world.”

–Kirkus (starred review)

“With a funky sense of humor blended with straight-faced common sense, [Sheridan] not only addresses the long-term psychological trauma of disaster but adds the importance of learning basic first-aid techniques, firearms training, knife skills, hunting and living in the wild, and expertise behind the wheel for a real world escape and survival. As a quirky survivalist primer, Sheridan’s work spells out how to stay alive when the world goes topsy-turvy.”

–Publishers Weekly

“Sheridan’s matter-of-fact tone is informational and gripping, and he never descends into a paranoid, ‘us or them’ tone. Ultimately, learning to live through an apocalypse is about learning to be a human being; it takes an appetite for knowledge, the ability to cooperate, and most of all, adaptability. Anyone who thinks humankind is getting soft should read this book—no matter what happens, it’s clear that some of us will survive.”

—Daniel Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of

Amped, Robopocalypse, and How to Survive a Robot Uprising

“A rollicking, brave, and surprisingly affecting account of one man’s quest to prepare himself and his family for the end of the world. Traveling from desert to arctic waste, Sheridan hurls himself fearlessly into learning every kind of skill you might need once the lights go out, and finds that what you know isn’t as important as how you carry yourself—an apt lesson for every life, not just those beset by zombie hordes.”

—Jeff Wise, author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger

Some of us keep a “go bag” packed with flashlights, batteries, a first aid kit, and other essentials in case of an emergency. Others have a couple cases of bottled water and a stock of nonperishable food in the kitchen. Most of us feel pretty confident that we can make it through a few days without power, or we’d have what we need in order to evacuate our homes quickly. But after all the movies where a meteor hits Earth, all the news reports on tsunamis and wildfires, not to mention the buzz about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012, do we actually know what to do if a real disaster strikes? How would we survive if a catastrophe results in TEOTWAWKI (in survivalist lingo, “The End of the World As We Know It”)?

In THE DISASTER DIARIES: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse (The Penguin Press, January 28, 2013), author and survival expert Sam Sheridan embarks on a quest to prepare himself and his family for the end of the world. He had traveled the world as an EMT, a mixed martial arts fighter, a sailor, a firefighter, and a construction worker in the South Pole. There was hardly any extreme survival situation he had not faced head-on. Yet when Sheridan became a father he was beset with nightmares about being unable to protect his son. If a rogue wave hit his beach community, would he be able to get out? If the power grid went down, did he have enough food and water for his family? Unable to set aside his fears, he decided instead to confront them by acquiring as many skills, in as many different doomsday situations, as he possibly could—including city-leveling earthquakes, being dropped into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on his back, and even being attacked by a horde of zombies.

From training with an Olympic weightlifter to an apprenticeship in stealing cars with an ex-gang member, from an intense three week-long gun course in the hundred-degree heat of Alabama to agonizing lessons in Arctic survival and igloo-buidling, Sheridan left no stone unturned. Did he learn enough to survive if a meteor struck the earth? Sheridan can’t be one hundred percent sure, but as he points out, it would be a damn shame to live through the initial impact only to die a few days later because he didn’t know how to build a fire.

Action-packed, brave, and surprisingly moving, THE DISASTER DIARIES is irresistible armchair adventure reading for everyone curious about what it might take to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. Though deeply entertaining and often very funny, Sheridan’s book also helps expand our understanding of the world by urging us to be aware of our surroundings, to pay attention to intuition, and to take responsibility for what happens to us and our loved ones.