Would you (or other Freepers) recommend any books of instruction in basic life skills without modern tools/appliances similar to the Foxfire series?
http://www.foxfire.org/thefoxfirebooks.aspx
For those unfamiliar with FoxFire, Volume 1:
The Foxfire Book
Price: $19.95
This volume, the original anthology, celebrates the home life and creative history of Appalachia, featuring sections on hog dressing, log cabin building, soap making, basket weaving, planting by the signs, preserving foods, making butter, snake lore, hunting tales, faith healing, and moonshining.
Table of Contents:
“This is the way I was raised up”
Aunt Arie
Wood
Tools and Skills
Building a Log Cabin
Chimney Building
White Oak Splits
Making a Hamper out of White Oak Splits
Making a Basket out of White Oak Splits
An Old Chair Maker Shows How
Rope, Straw, and Feathers are to Sleep on
A Quilt is Something Human
Soapmaking
Cooking on a Fireplace, Dutch Oven, and Wood Stove
Daniel Manous
Mountain Recipes
Preserving Vegetables
Preserving Fruit
Churning Your Own Butter
Slaughtering Hogs
Curing and Smoking Hog
Recipes for Hog
Weather Signs
Planting by the Signs
The Buzzard and the Dog
Home Remedies
Hunting
Dressing and Cooking Wild Animal Foods
Hunting Tales
Snake Lore
Moonshining as a Fine Art
Faith Healing
Hillard Green
Carla Emery started writing The Encyclopedia of Country Living in 1969 during the back-to-the-land movement of that time. She continued to add content and refine the information over the years, and the book went from a self-published mimeographed document to a book of 928 pages. This 40th Anniversary Edition reflects the most up-to-date resource information and the most personal version of the book that became Carla Emery’s life work. It is the original manual of basic country skills that have proved essential and necessary for people living in the country, the city, and everywhere in between.
The practical advice in this exhaustive reference tool includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more.
This is the essential resource for country living, modern homesteading, growing and preserving foods, and cooking from scratch. Carla Emery’s The Encyclopedia of Country Living contains 1,000,000 words, 2,000+ recipes, and 1,500+ mail-order sources (for everything she tells you how to do, she also tells you where to get the supplies to do it).
This book is so basic, so thorough, so reliable, that it deserves a place in every home.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1570618402/
Might find something in :
Firearms, Traps and Tools of the Mountain Man by Carl Russell.
From the description: John 'Lofty' Wiseman served in the British Special Air Service (SAS) for twenty-six years. The SAS Survival Handbook is based on the training techniques of this world-famous elite fighting force.
It was recommended by Vince Flynn in his July newsletter.