Here is a question worth sitting with. If the power went out tonight and stayed out, does anyone else in your house know what to do? Not you. Them.
For most families the honest answer is no. One person reads about this stuff and everyone else assumes that person will handle it. Which works fine right up until that person is at work, on the road, or the one who got hurt.
That is the gap this book fills, and it costs nine dollars.
Why The First Three Days
Seventy two hours is roughly how long you are on your own. That is the gap between when something happens and when outside help reliably reaches ordinary people. After a major storm the crews are working, but they are working somewhere else first. The ambulance is stuck on the same flooded road as everyone else.
Almost everything that goes badly wrong for families in a disaster happens inside that window, and it usually happens because nobody had thought it through in advance. People do not fail from lack of supplies nearly as often as they fail from standing in the kitchen at 2am arguing about what to do next.
What Is Actually In It
The First 72 Hours by Phil Elmore, revised and expanded edition. A physical paperback, not a download. It covers:
- What to stockpile before it is gone, and how much you genuinely need rather than how much looks impressive.
- Cooking when the power and the stove are both down.
- Medical problems when help is hours out instead of minutes.
- Natural disasters, from storms to floods to hard freezes.
- Shelter, home defense, and self-defense when normal rules are suspended.
- Social violence, riots, and active shooter situations.
- Bugging out, which the author rightly calls the hardest thing on the list.
The format is the point. Short sections, heavy on bullets and images, written to be acted on rather than studied. A six hundred page manual is useless in an emergency because nobody reads six hundred pages by flashlight.
Why We Picked It
If you have read much of what we publish, you have seen the same argument over and over. Competence beats equipment. A packed cheap bag beats an empty expensive one. Reps beat gear.
This is the written version of that argument, and it is the cheapest thing we have ever pointed you at. Our bug-out bag checklist tells you what to pack and our home defense piece covers your layers. This covers the part in between, which is the sequence. What you do first, second, and third while the clock is running.
The other reason is the one from the top of this page. A paperback on the shelf is something your spouse can pick up. A plan living in your head is not transferable, and the whole family needing to know it is the single most overlooked part of preparedness.
What It Costs
Nine dollars for one copy plus shipping. It drops from there if you buy more than one.
- One copy. $9 plus shipping.
- Two copies. $8 each plus shipping.
- Three copies. $8 each with shipping included.
- Five copies. $7 each with shipping included.
On pricing, we will give you the real comparison rather than the one in the ad. The publisher’s own site lists this book around $38 and has run it at $19 on sale. The promotion quotes higher figures than that. Either way nine dollars is genuinely below what you would pay buying it directly, so the deal is real, it is just not as dramatic as the headline.
The multi-copy tiers are where this gets interesting. Three copies with free shipping means one on your shelf, one at your parents’ house, and one in the vehicle. That is twenty four dollars to get three households thinking about the same plan.
Straight Talk
- A book is not a plan until you use it. Reading it once is the floor. Walking your household through two or three scenarios at the kitchen table is where it starts working. Otherwise it is just a yellow thing on a shelf.
- Breadth means it is not deep on any one topic. It covers everything from floods to active shooters in one volume, which is the right call for a quick reference and the wrong call if you want a thorough treatment of any single subject. Use it as the index to what you need to learn next.
- The stated retail figures in the ad run high. See the pricing note above. The book is worth owning at nine dollars regardless.
- Expect an upsell at checkout. There is a medical go bag offered for around $59 on the order page. Optional. Decline it if you only want the book, and read your total before confirming.
The seller backs it with a one year guarantee, refund or free replacement, which is unusually long for a nine dollar paperback.
Do This With It
Buy it, read it once over a couple of evenings, then leave it somewhere visible rather than filed away. On a shelf in the kitchen, not in a box in the basement.
Then do the part almost nobody does. Sit down with whoever lives in your house and talk through three things: where we meet if we cannot get home, who we call if phones are working, and what we grab if we have ten minutes. That conversation takes twenty minutes and is worth more than anything else on this site.
Nine dollars and one evening is the lowest barrier to entry in preparedness we know of. There is no good reason to put it off.
Get The First 72 Hours here while stock lasts.
Disclosure: Gear and Patriots has a promotional relationship with the seller of this book and may earn a commission if you order. That costs you nothing extra. We are not the author or publisher. Nothing in this book or on this page is medical, legal, or professional emergency advice, and no guide substitutes for training, local emergency guidance, or calling for help when you can. Comparison prices were observed in October 2026 and change. Pricing, shipping rates, stock, guarantee terms, and checkout offers are set by the seller and can change without notice.