The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation - Softcover

Edelman, Amy; Begley, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593837649 ISBN 13: 9780593837641

Publisher: Ten Speed Press, 2026

Synopsis

A comprehensive, commonsense guide to preparing for and surviving emergency situations, from wildfires, flash floods, and extreme heat to power outages, social unrest, and the next pandemic--no bunkers or weapons required.

Unlike traditional prepper books that focus on doom and the darker side of survival, what most of us really need is a straightforward guide to getting through a disaster safely and with our mental health intact. Because chances are you or someone you know has been affected by one of the many extreme weather events and their aftermath in the last few years—not to mention the pandemic.

In The Emergency Playbook, author Amy Edelman and survival expert Chris Begley help you—and your family, friends, neighbors, and pets—get through a range of bad situations safely, and then rebuild afterwards, no matter where you live or what your circumstances. 

With step-by-step checklists and plentiful tips, this fact-filled handbook prepares you for disrupted access to food and clean water, lengthy power outages, downed communication, housing loss, and much more. It also emphasizes the importance of positive thinking and community-building—because when disaster strikes, we'll have to lean on each other and work together.

Featuring instructions on packing a go-bag, storing food and water in small spaces, and useful skills to learn ahead of time (first aid, self-defense), The Emergency Playbook is the practical guide you need to read before things go sideways.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Edelman is a PR and marketing professional, the founder of book review service IndieReader, and the author of The Little Black Dress and Manless in Montclair. She has appeared on Today and her books have been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and others. Chris Begley, PhD, is an archeologist, professor, wilderness survival instructor, and the author of The Next Apolcalypse. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and was named a National Geographic Explorer and one of the "World’s 50 Most Adventurous Men" by Men’s Journal. He has also been featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and American Archaeology, and in documentaries on the BBC, Discovery Channel, and elsewhere.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Prepping Lifestyle

What goes up must come down. —Isaac Newton

Hi. Allow us to introduce ourselves: From where we live (Lexington, Kentucky, versus Northern New Jersey) to how we look (a six-foot man versus a barely five-foot woman), we are very different people. Chris is an archaeologist, a National Geographic Explorer, and a Fulbright scholar who also teaches wilderness survival skills. Amy spent most of her career in a different kind of “wilderness,” specifically New York City in the mid-1980s, working in public relations and marketing and specializing in fashion, lifestyle, and consumer goods. In her spare time, she wrote several books, including a history of the little black dress. Chris doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty, while Amy couldn’t imagine life without her twice-monthly pedicure.

Chris’s grandfather was an Appalachian folk hero, while Amy’s immigrated from Austria and was the first Jewish man to attend Villanova University on a sports scholarship. Chris was named one of Men’s Journal’s “50 Most Adventurous Men.” After her husband died in 2001, Amy’s greatest adventure became raising two young kids on her own while writing a fictional memoir about searching for a new husband. Chris filmed a BBC documentary in the jungle with actor Ewan McGregor.

Amy prefers not to explore jungles (but would make an exception for Ewan). Differences aside, we share many similarities: We are both married with children, we have developed insight into our collective future based on our knowledge and reading of science and history, and we are both planning accordingly for an increasingly tumultuous future.

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Amy’s first brush with not being prepared came a couple of decades ago at her cousin’s wedding. She was wearing a new pair of heels and an hour into the festivities had developed a blister the size of the bridal bouquet. After querying half the guests about the possible whereabouts of a Band-Aid, she was told that Uncle George always carried them. As he reached into the pocket of his tux and pulled out the OG boo-boo fix, Amy felt a huge sense of relief. From that day forward she swore she would always be prepared like Uncle George. How hard could it be to make room for a Band-Aid?

It was fifteen years later, after reading two climate change–related articles—David Wallace-Wells’s New York magazine July 2017 cover story, “The Doomed Earth Catalog,” and an academic paper, “How to Adapt to the End of the World,” written by former professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria Jem Bendell and quoted by Bloomberg in September 2018—when Amy recognized that, collectively, we were going to need more than a Band-Aid to prepare for our uncertain future. And while both articles were well researched, ran in respected and recognized publications, and prompted some lively dinner party conversation, the subject was a dark one and most people preferred not to dwell on it. Amy, however, was not one of those people.

Chris’s interest in preparedness is less surprising given his academic and career background and is spurred by a larger tragedy. As an archaeologist, he has lived and worked in some of the most remote areas of Central America, where much of the knowledge we think of as “survival” skills is employed in everyday activities. But when a member of his community died while looking for help after his car got stuck in the snowy mountains, Chris began teaching fundamental survival skills such as navigation, fire starting, and shelter building.

When Amy read Chris’s book The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (2021), she felt she had found someone with the hardcore survival expertise she lacked and a similar outlook on the future. The Next Apocalypse focuses on community and uses historical examples to separate wild imagination from likely scenarios. Chris also knows from personal experience that having a plan can make an enormous difference in how individuals and communities come out on the other side of a disaster. Amy reached out to Chris about writing a practical guidebook that followed a community-focused, level-headed approach. Chris also recognized the need, so we got to work.

We wrote The Emergency Playbook because we think it’s needed, desperately and immediately. While we’d like to say that our opinion is shared, we’ve noticed that most of our family, friends, and colleagues— folks who are otherwise educated, engaged, and involved—are not even remotely prepared for emergencies, even the presently unfolding ones, which is weird, because the billionaire class clearly knows something is up.

If you don’t believe us, just Google “billionaire bunkers” and you’ll find stories everywhere from The Guardian and The Hollywood Reporter to Vice and CNN about fully equipped and heavily armed custom-built luxury safe houses, crammed to their reinforced rafters with indoor pools, hydroponic gardens, gourmet kitchens, and private golf courses. The new question asked in these circles isn’t how much money you make but rather how long you can survive when everything collapses. Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley tech bros keep their planes fully gassed and ready to fly to bunkers in New Zealand, stocked with everything they’ll presumably need till the end of time. Maybe the preparedness gene has something to do with their success, but, hey, the ability to gather supplies and make a plan is available to the rest of us too. Why not take up their quest to survive what’s coming? Is there something they know that we don’t?

In the years since Amy read those articles about the potential damage we might see from climate change, the worst outcomes have proven to be true and have often occurred several years before predicted. In addition to having already breached the global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrial levels set by the Paris Agreement, 2024 ranked second highest for the number of billion-dollar disasters in a calendar year. The subsequent list of such disasters from that year reads like “The Twelve Days of Christmas”: seventeen severe storms, five tropical cyclones, two winter storms, one flooding event, one drought/heat wave, and one wildfire event. And what of the “partridge in a pear tree”? Many partridge populations are declining because of habitat loss, pesticide use, and overhunting, and the Italian grey partridge is now considered extinct in the wild. Fruit trees in general are struggling because severe droughts and flooding are making them more susceptible to poor growing seasons, pests, and fungal diseases.

Sounds bad, yes? And if climate disasters aren’t enough to send you screaming into the abyss, we are also seeing a rise in civil strife and financial instability along with deadly viruses and pandemics (measles, tuberculosis, bird flu). You’re probably thinking right about now that you should put down this book and slowly back away. But unlike the hard-core prepper manuals written by “doomers” that focus on being heavily armed and raise the question of whether you will or won’t have to eat your neighbor, our book does not intend to overwhelm you with nightmares and hopelessness. Group identity is stronger than ever, and we understand that many people aren’t interested in learning skills from folks who seem to be borderline conspiracy theorists or center their advice on guns and the defense of a stash of freeze-dried possum parts. Weapons and walls are unlikely to work in the long run, and who wants to live like that anyway?

The Emergency Playbook, on the other hand, is about knowing there is a light at the end of the tunnel and making sure you have a flashlight and enough gas in your car to get you there. It’s about seeing the glass as half full and knowing how much water you need (and where to find it) so you can top off your stylish stainless steel flask and stay safe until the emergency is over. It’s about believing you can survive as long as you have the fortitude, appropriate clothing, and two different ways of getting to your family’s safe meeting destination.

In these pages you’ll find well-organized information on how to plan for the specific disruption(s) you are most likely to face. After all, who has the time to sort through the particulars on how to escape a wildfire when you really need info on preparing for a hurricane? What you won’t find are zombies and cannibals and bunkers. This is not prepping for doomsday. And even though the road ahead may look a little dark and unfamiliar, we don’t lead with fear.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593837649
• ISBN 13: 9780593837641
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320