100 Skills You'll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It)

July 21, 2015

100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It), by Ana Maria Spagna

You’re standing by the microwave, eyes and fingers glued to your phone as you wait impatiently for last night’s leftovers to reheat, when suddenly it hits you that you’ve grown accustomed to a pretty pampered lifestyle. It’s not like this for everyone, you think. It might not always be like this for you. Disaster scenarios play like movies in your head, you realize you have few or no basic survival skills, and by the time your panic attack is over the leftovers are cold again.

Ana Maria Spagna feels your pain. The Washington-based writer aims to quell your apocalypse woes with 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It), a charming primer on handy skills for the end of days. When the ease of phones and microwaves is gone, you’ll want to be ready.

The cheerfully illustrated guide lists a wide range of activities from latrine digging to laughing, taking no more than a page for each and poetically explaining its benefits. Someday, the proper identification of medicinal herbs may be the only way to stop a fatal fever; a strong understanding of equine body language may be the new AAA. But it’s not all life or death—Spagna suggests that while seed collecting and snowshoe crafting may be crucial skills in the event of a calamity that destroys all of our modern conveniences, it will be just as important to make music, tell stories, and sit on the porch. The world may have ended, but life must go on.

Full disclosure: this book won’t actually teach you the skills it describes—aside from a useful tent-pitching diagram and a couple of pages on knots, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It) mostly consists of rudimentary summaries. If you’re looking for detailed instructions on ink making and mushroom identification, best look elsewhere. However, if you want something to put your privileged life in perspective and help you write your to-do list for the end times, Spagna’s book is a good place to start.

100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (As We Know It), by Ana Maria Spagna (Storey Publishing, 2015)

Jules Zucker is a rising junior at the University of Southern California. When she's not writing, she's usually camping, playing guitar, or eating oatmeal, sometimes all at once.