Cover image obtained from http://www.audible.com
SURVIVORS: The Coming Collapse
Author: James Wesley Rawles
Type of Book: Audiobook – Unabridged
Length: 13 hours and 41 minutes
Narrator: Dick Hill
Genre: Fiction- Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Prepper Fiction
Release Date: October 4, 2011
Series: Founders – Book Two
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐
* I received a free copy of this audiobook through AudiobookBlast dot com in exchange for an honest review.
This book was written as a fictional tale of what the author envisions as the inevitable collapse of the world’s economy.
I believe that the author set out to achieve two goals by writing this book. He attempted to write a compelling fiction story while also communicating to his readers tips and tricks to help them prepare for the “coming collapse.”
The problem with having two such lofty goals for a single book is that the storyline was often placed on the back-burner to go into minute detail about survival strategies. Nowhere in the story is this more readily apparent than when the author starts to go ‘on-and-on’ about guns and the individual features of each one. I understand the need for a weapon (or possibly even two) if the country were to fall into lawless chaos, however, most readers will probably not care about the make and model of their weapon. All they will care about is whether or not it is reliable and whether or not they will be able to obtain ammunition for it.
I have read quite a few different reviews for “SURVIVORS” and those reviews have been varied. It seems like readers either love this book, or they hate it. There does not seem to be a middle-ground. The major difference between my experience and the experience of the other reviewers whose comments I have read seems to be in what format they “read.” I listened to “SURVIVORS” on unabridged audiobook and I am very glad I did. I believe that I would have wanted to stop reading a few times if I was reading a paper or e-copy of this book.
The overly detailed descriptions of guns and their components struck me as tedious and boring. This is also true in the sections about religion. At times I felt like I was being told that if I was not a Christian then I would not survive. This seems simplistic to me.
I enjoyed the part of the story where Anders Lane was trying to return home from his tour of duty overseas to America and the hardships he faced on his journey.
There was another storyline that I enjoyed and that was the woman and her mother who had stockpiled seeds. (I can’t remember their names.) However, this storyline gets dropped and readers never find out if they survived or not.
The narration by Dick Hill is very well done. He has a terrific tone and his cadence and pacing are excellent.
Overall I rate this audiobook as 3 out of 5 stars. ⭐⭐⭐
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
<img src="https://amiesbookreviews.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/image11.jpg" alt="image" width="220" height="176"
James Wesley Rawles was born in California in 1960.
Rawles is a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer. He is the founder and Senior Editor of SurvivalBlog.com which covers survival and preparedness topics, and has published collected material from this in two books. He also works as a survival retreat consultant and is a Constitutionalist Christian libertarian.
ABOUT THE NARRATOR:
Dick Hill is an American audiobook narrator who has narrated over four hundred audiobooks.
When I first started listening to this audiobook I instantly knew I had heard Dick Hill’s voice before. He is perhaps best known as the narrator of author Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” series. He has been narrating audiobooks for almost twenty years.
To learn more about this narrator visit http://www.dickhill.com
