The Lost Skills of Independence by Claude Davis: Book Review

I’ve been reading Claude Davis since The Lost Ways came out, and that book is still the one I hand people when they ask me where to start prepping. Then came The Lost Ways 2, and after that a whole run of good books he put his name to next to co-authors. So when word got around this spring that he had another one coming, and that this time it was all him, cover to cover, I cleared a spot on the shelf before I even knew what was in it.

When I received The Lost Skills of Independence, I opened the box at the kitchen table, which turned out to be a good idea. My son had the book out of my hands within a minute. My daughter took it off him about ten minutes after that and started reading the skill cards out loud around the house. By the time dinner was over, the two of them were negotiating with each other about which projects we were doing that weekend, and I want to be clear about how strange that is. I have a shelf of survival books in this house. My kids have never asked me about a single one of them.

So we did two of them that Saturday. The blue barrel root cellar (page 28) took us the whole morning and half a pot of coffee, and the DIY plastic bottle home heater (page 34) took the afternoon, and both of them turned out pretty impressive. My son still walks out to check the fridge every couple of days like he’s inspecting something he patented.

Stay with me on this one, because it’s the book you’ve been waiting for since you’ve became a prepper. Trust me on this one! 

The Lost Skills of Independence Went to #1 Almost Right Away

The early-bird version of the book came out in August 2026, and it wasn’t long before it was carrying the #1 Best Seller badge on Amazon.

It’s a spiral-bound hardcover, 262 pages, and the people who got early copies have it sitting at a 5.0. A couple of the retailers stocking it are already showing backorder, which tells you plenty about how fast the first run went out the door.

Davis has had bestsellers before with The Lost Book of Remedies and The Lost Super Foods, so this isn’t new ground for him. Even so, I’ve watched his releases for years now and this one climbed quicker than any of them.

What’s Actually Inside the Book

The cover is what gets you first. It’s a proper hardcover, spiral-bound so it lies flat and stays open while your hands are busy, printed on thick paper that doesn’t curl or tear when your fingers are wet and your hands are dirty. 

Every single skill has full-color, step-by-step illustrations, and from everything I’ve heard those were drawn by human illustrators rather than run through an AI generator. You can tell just by looking at them, since they’ve got that hand-inked, old-school catalog quality that machines still can’t manage to fake.

There’s no ordinary table of contents either, which I liked more than I expected to. The front of the book gives you 200 illustrated skill cards, each with its page number next to it, so you spot the little drawing of the thing you’re after and go straight to the page. My daughter figured that out before I did.

Each skill page lists the materials, the tools and the ingredients up front, then walks you through the steps with a drawing for each one. So you know exactly what you need before you start, instead of getting halfway in and discovering you’re short a fitting and it’s Sunday.

Below you can see the chapters of the books and what they cover.

Self-Sufficient Home Projects

This chapter walks you through 20 practical home projects worth a closer look. I built the EMP shield trash can in a single afternoon, and it came together without a hitch.

There’s also a fridge that keeps food cold without electricity, plus a solar heater you put together out of plastic bottles. I did that last one with my son, and it turned out to be a fun way to finally use up all those bottles we’d been stashing in the garage.

Fundamental Survival Skills

This chapter showed me how to turn saltwater into drinking water, purify it with nothing but a plastic bag, and pull dew off the grass with a t-shirt. It also walks you through getting out of a car that’s gone into water or caught fire, even when the doors won’t open. That part took me only a minute to get through, but I’ll remember it forever.

Lost Kitchen Secrets

This chapter made me feel like I’d opened my grandma’s cooking book. That’s how I found out you can bake bread inside wide-mouth jars and it keeps for five years, and I tried it, soft in the middle just like the page said.

It also showed me I’ve been cleaning my cast iron wrong for years. On top of that, there’s curing meat, canning, and keeping a pantry stocked without a fridge.

Lost Healing Remedies

Reading this chapter, I found out that there’s a weed growing along my driveway that works as a mild painkiller. You break the stem, put the sap under your tongue, and wait a minute. You can also find other interesting remedies with the most common U.S. plants. 

Independent Living Skills

The chapter goes from sweeping your house for hidden microphones and cameras to getting out of zip ties, which is a strange jump until you read it. Then it drops back down to the ordinary stuff, like fixing a sink or a split hose. On top of that, a handful of home projects I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Self-Sustaining Garden

That’s how I found out that my fence has been useless for eleven years. I’ve learned that I can use it to grow a hidden garden that can hold 150 pounds of food on it. I also stopped throwing away eggshells and wood ash after reading what you can do with them.

Dark Psychology

I didn’t expect this chapter in a survival book. Still, I’ve read it three times. When someone insults you, the first five seconds of your answer decide how they’ll treat you from then on. There’s also the CIA method for getting the truth out of someone, without asking them a single question.

My Family’s Favorite Skills in the Book

I’ve got a well and I’ve got storage, so I figured the water section wouldn’t teach me much. Then I hit the saltwater page. I’ve been reading about that method in scattered fragments for twenty years, but nobody ever laid it out properly, step by step, with the materials listed out front. So I’m trying it this fall, and if you’re anywhere near the coast you’ll want that page more than you think.

My wife went straight for the gardening and remedy chapters. She made the honey-fermented garlic the first week, and there’s a permanent jar of it in the pantry now. But the one that actually won her over was the stop-bleeding powder (pg.174), since she’d just spent an afternoon dealing with a cow that tore her flank open on the wire fence. And with the kids running around barefoot half the summer, it gets used on scraped knees more than anything else.  

My son claimed the Self-Sufficient Home Projects chapter as his personal territory. We built the off-grid refrigerator (pg. 24) first, since that’s the page he put his finger on, and it turned into a genuinely good weekend instead of a chore. The illustrations are the reason. He could follow them himself without me reading instructions over his shoulder, so he was building and I was just helping him when he needed an extra hand.

From there we did the plastic bottle heater (pg. 34), and the pallet food fence is marked for spring. He’s the one bringing up what we make next now, which is worth more to me than any single skill in the book.

Here’s how our projects turned out:

My daughter’s still in primary school, so the drawings got her before the words did. She flipped to the Amish bread in a jar and hasn’t let it go, so we’re baking it Saturday. It’s simple enough with adult supervision.

What I Didn’t Like About It

The spiral binding bothered me at first. It looks cheaper than a sewn hardcover, and it refuses to line up neatly on the shelf next to my other Davis books.

But I’ve come around on it, since it lies dead flat and stays open while your hands are busy, which is exactly what you need when you’re following steps with wet hands. And it means you can tear a page out clean, so you can make copies or throw a few skills in your bag when it’s time to bug out.

Why It’s Worth Getting This Book as a Prepper

I’ve got six or seven survival books on the shelf, and after the first read I could have written most of them myself. Water storage, rotate your cans, three ways to start a fire. Fine when you’re starting out, but I’ve been doing this eleven years and I don’t need the beginner’s chapter again in a new cover.

So they sit there, and the only thing I’ve genuinely learned in the last few years came off forums and from an old neighbor who cures his own bacon. 

Meanwhile, The Lost Skills of Independence is made out of 200 illustrated cards instead of a table of contents, so you flip until you see the drawing of what you’re after and that card tells you the page. Each skill is a page or two, materials and tools listed at the top, so you know what you’re short on before you commit to anything.

Here’s why you should get your copy ASAP:

• If the grid stays down past a week, your freezer becomes a liability. This is where you learn pemmican at 3,500 calories a pound, bacon that holds five years, and the Forever Sausage that kept German pioneers alive on the Oregon Trail.
• If your stored water runs out, you’re down to whatever FEMA gives you. But you can filter your water using a ceramic pot, or make a multifunctional hand pump. The 3-barrel water harvesting system it’s something you’d want to try next spring.
• If an EMP hits, you’d still have a working car, a Faraday cage in the garage, and the trash can project that keeps your electronics safe.
• If someone in your house gets hurt and there are no pharmacies available, you’ll want the Amish painkiller and the antibacterial pine tree tincture. Plus a dozen more recipes you’d want to save for later.
• If the power bill keeps climbing, the off-grid fridge, the plastic bottle heater, and the trick for cooling a house without electricity start paying you back the first summer.
• If things get bad and you’re stuck with other people, one person always takes the blame for the group. This chapter shows you how that person gets chosen, so it won’t be you.

Don’t Buy This Book If….

… you’re content letting the grid, the supermarket and the pharmacy handle everything for you, because none of it will interest you and the money’s better spent elsewhere. Don’t buy it if you’re planning to ride out your retirement in a rented box in the city, with somebody else’s hands on your heat and your water. And don’t buy it if you want it for the shelf, since it only pays off once you’ve actually built something out of it.

But if you’re the kind of American who works for what he has, who’d rather fix a thing than replace it, and who wants his kids to know how any of this gets done, then The Lost Skills of Independence by Claude Davis is your book. Those are the values it came out of, and they’re the ones it hands down.

Where to Get the Lost Skills of Independence

I’ll be straight with you about my hesitation. I already own most of Claude Davis’ books, so I assumed this one would be a repackaging of things I’d read before, and I nearly let it go by. I ordered it on the strength of the sample illustrations instead, and it’s now the one book out of the whole collection I’d grab first if I had to walk out the door in a hurry.

Right now you can get the early-bird offer running at 76% off, which is the lowest it’s been since launch, and three bonus guides come bundled with it: Wild Edibles and Medicinal Herbs You Can Forage for or Find Around Your House, How to Become Self-Sufficient on a 1/4 Acre of Land, and The Patriot’s Bug-In Guide.

There’s a keep-the-book guarantee on top of that as well. You get 60 days to put it to work, and if you’re not satisfied they refund the price and you keep the physical copy anyway. 

Not sure yet? Then watch a preview video of the Lost Skills of Independence and see for yourself:

They’ve told me that copies are already going on backorder at some of the other retailers, so I wouldn’t sit too long on the early-bird price. Get your copy now and step into the next level of your prepping game.

Eleven years into prepping and I’ve bought plenty of books that taught me nothing. This one’s different, and the proof is that it’s still on my kitchen table with three people in the house using it.

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