The Survival Chemist (#C-562)

My son loved it!

this book is very small but contains tons of condinsed info. I read it from cover to cover in 2 hours. Its more of a booklet, but it is more enlighting than some 400 page books that i have bought.

this book will teach you things that can be applied to other situations in your life if you use them properly.

Do not buy this book for it is not only lacking in any sort of value, but it is dangerous.>Does this book tell you how to create soap from wood ashes and animal fat? Nope.>Does this book tell you how to purify water in an emergency? Well it sort of does. It tells you how to distill water which most everyone already knows. But then it tells you to chemically purify water using water purification tablets. What do you do if you do not have water purification tablets remains a mystery unless you follow the advice to filter water through activated charcoal. This in an of itself will only work to absorb dissolved contaminants and does nothing, however, for pathogens that will likely be present so this remains a very dangerous piece of advice. Does this book tell you how to make activated charcoal? Nope, so once again you are left without any help. How about the treatment of poo and pee to render your daily waste safe? No help there either. Fertilizer to help your crops grow. Nope.>So what does this book teach you to do? It tells you how to protect wood posts from rotting, but one has to wonder the value of this when you consider the rotting of wood is only of a concern for long term structures and most people are concerned with surviving an initial period when the learning curve for survival is the steepest. Do people really care about ensuring their wooden posts last ten years instead of 5 years? But to make matters worse, it specifies the use of things like copper naphthenate or sodium fluoride (a highly toxic poison). How many people do you know that just happen to have these pure chemicals lying about?>This short, 90 page books spends several pages on how to make explosives. Why? It tells you how to make dynamite by mixing nitroglycerine with saw dust, but who in their right mind would ever have nitroglycerine around since owning it is a crime. Later in the book, the author tells you how to make nitroglycerine, but including these instructions is extraordinarily lacking in judgement for nitroglycerine is a treacherous, shock, friction, and heat sensitive explosive. I know of no professional chemist who would even consider making this for any reason. This book tells you how to make picric acid, but picric acid is just as unstable as nitroglycerine. It also tells you how to make gun powder, but the history books are filled with those who died trying to make it. So why does the author seem to think that everyone needs to run out and start making explosives when the end of the world arrives?>Lastly, this book seems to operate under the assumption that when the end of civilization arrives, you just happen to be stuck in a chemistry lab/stockroom. He details how to make nitric and hydrochloric acids, but to them require the use of sulfuric acid. To make sulfuric acid, you need to start with lead acid batteries and concentrate the electrolyte found within. Lye is extremely important in the making of soaps and such, but nothing is provided on how to make it. However, should you be subjected to acid rain, you can use solutions of analine and potassium chlorate to acid proof your tent and should you need fire-proof rope, you can use a boric acid mixture as a "solution".>As a research chemist with 30+years of experience, I found this book to be less than useless - it is outright dangerous. What this book does tell you is esoteric and will likely never arise in a survival situation while what you should need to know in any survival situation is largely absent in this abysmally short book.

This is a skinny little book with a slightly larger than normal font, a lot of spacing and some drawings. It has little useful information - even for a zombie apocalypse. For example, an appendix is devoted to the making of hydrochloric acid from chemicals. Now hydrochloric acid (aka muriatic acid) is available from any hardware store and the concept that all the hardware stores have been destroyed yet you have a stash of somewhat exotic chemicals available is a little bizarre. Likewise there is information on rot-proofing and insect-proofing wood. It involves using chemicals which you somehow protected from the roving hordes of zombies even though they stole all of your pressure-treated (rot and insect resistant) wood.There are a few dollars of entertainment value here but the asking price seems too much... and I paid too much.

It teaches you how to do things like treat wood to build a shelter and what chemicals to use but not how to get those chemicals or how to make those chemicals

These reviews crack me up. This is a great book for what it was meant at the time it was written and there are still useful things in it. The part I don't understand are the reviews complaining.This book was published in 1987 originally and the description clearly says 59 pages. If you were old enough to remember 1987 you would know there was no internet, the Cold war was just ending, and people were starting to panic the world would end on January 1st 2000 because computers would fail.Chemicals were not as regulated as the are now so more were available to the everyday person and there was no Amazon to pop on and buy stuff like water purification tablets. If you are looking for a nostalgic book on how people were going to survive the worlds end 35 years this is a great book but if you are looking for something based on modern technologies that were not invented then this is not going to help.

got what i paid for , but it works better than i though it would , good job guys ill buy again