This book could save your life.

Drill Doctor

Yes, that could be said of many books on such subjects as nutrition, fitness, first aid and safety. However, The Survivor's Club is about the generic art and science of surviving. What separates those who do from those who don't? Chance plays a role, but so do other qualities. Sherwood examines them and even gives you the opportunity to learn your survivor IQ and how to increase it.

Drill Doctor

"Survivors survive." That's a famous quote from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. He liked to write stories about people who prepared for whatever the universe might throw at them. Who fought back. Who did whatever it took to come out on top.

The Survivors Club makes a systemic effort to determine the qualities that separates people who live through extraordinary problems from those who don't. Although it's filled with miraculous stories of survival, the author is also good at connecting us with more ordinary and common but still difficult circumstances of disease and accidents.

Most of us will never be attacked by a mountain lion, fall off a cruise ship in the middle of the night or jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but most everybody will someday face a difficult trial -- or two or three. Life has a way of knocking people down, then kicking them in the kidneys.

Sherwood's investigations range from the United States Navy's Aviation Survival Training Center to the study of why some people are accident-prone (it's not an accident) to the Holocaust to the science of good luck to the genetics of resilience to the Institute for the Study of Emotional Stress where Dr. Lawrence Calhoun and colleagues study the little-known science of post-traumatic GROWTH.

Turns out the despite all the media publicity about post-traumatic stress disorder, it turns out that most survivors of trauma are actually transformed for the better.

Of course, the catch is that first you do have to survive. We know that many don't. Why not? The author investigates the phenomenon of skydivers who die because they don't inflate their parachutes at all, or too late. How could somebody falling to through the sky forget that?

Related to skydiving is what happens during airplane crashes. Statistically, your chances of dying during a given flight are one in sixty million -- comparable to winning the lottery.

Sherwood examines flying in great detail. If you ever fly in an airplane, you want to read this book. I was glad to learn that it's so much more safe than I'd realized.

Of course, there are air crashes that kill everybody onboard. Fortunately, they're extremely rare. In almost all airplane accidents, most people live.

The author consulted experts to learn why the survivors lived and why the others didn't. Where you sit can make a difference, but the living and the dead can be seated next to each other.

There are things you can -- and should -- do every time you fly, to reduce your risk of being one of the fatalities. The next time I fly, I'm going to check out where the nearest exits are and pay attention when the attendants go through that safety drill.

This book comes with an additional benefit. You get a unique code qualifying you to take an online psychological test to discover your own survival IQ, what kind of survivor you are and what you can do to improve your score.

The Survivor's Club by Ben Sherwood

Drill Doctor