Why Not Survive the Apocalypse?

The Apocalypse always shows up on a Tuesday.

Forget zombies. Forget the bunker, the crossbow and the forty-pound bucket of freeze-dried lasagna. The end of the world that's actually coming for you is small, local, and extremely polite about it: a low-water crossing that's "only a few inches," a blue-sky afternoon on a fourteener, a generator humming in the attached garage, a cow that has opinions about your dog, a gorgeous empty stretch of beach where, for some reason, nobody is swimming.

Thirty-two ordinary ends of the world, the kind that happen every year in the United States and Canada, each told in two parts:

• The Human Story: a darkly funny tale in which a perfectly reasonable person makes exactly the wrong call, with magnificent confidence and excellent arguments. The GPS, the gut feeling, the brother-in-law who watched a video once: everybody gets a turn.

• The Reality: what actually happened, why smart people make these mistakes, and what to do instead, based on guidance from the National Weather Service, the CDC, the American Red Cross, the National Park Service, emergency physicians and search-and-rescue teams. Every life-saving instruction sits in a clear box with zero jokes in it.

Chapter by chapter you pick up 27 simple reflexes that stack on top of each other, until a final weekend where everything goes wrong at once and you get to find out whether they stuck. Heat stroke and hypothermia, lightning and flash floods, wildfire and storm surge, rip currents and cold water, rattlesnakes and death caps, carbon monoxide, avalanches, choking, and the 911 call you'll want to get right the first time.

Every important fact is tagged by how solid it is (consensus, depends on context, varies by location, uncertain), and the main sources are listed. True stories, from The Station nightclub fire to Mann Gulch, Hurricane Ian and the Tham Luang cave rescue, are told with respect.

For weekend hikers, parents, commuters, campers, the chronically overconfident, fans of dark humor, and anyone who'd rather laugh at a disaster before it happens than after.

This book is not a substitute for first-aid training. It will, however, make you want to sign up for one.