100 deadly skills The SEAL operative's survival guide to eluding pursuers, evading capture, and surviving any dangerous situation

New books about risk sit at the intersection of two staunchly American traditions: a love of vigilantism and a faith in the multiple uses of aluminum foil. SELF-HELP IS MORE than just a genre of books. It's a pile of tea leaves, a crystal ball, a mood ring on the finger of America - pick your divination metaphor, and it's that. A glance at the self-help titles on each week's best-seller list provides a diagram of the topics and shortcomings that readers are fretting over at this very moment, from gut health to decluttering to the proliferation of workplace distractions. One of the many things we're currently agonizing over is risk. How to manage it, how to topple it and - of course - how to harness it for our personal and professional growth. The presence of cameras on our phones means that nothing in life goes uncaptured. It has never been easier to document horrors - from fatal police encounters to raging wildfires to volcanic explosions - which means it has never been easier to imagine horrible events befalling us. Our brains barely have to generate original nightmare material anymore. We've got terabytes of footage to draw upon. If you're the type of person who greets peril with a brisk nod and a devastating elbow strike, you might turn to 100 DEADLY SKILLS: The SEAL Operative's Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation (Touchstone, paper, $18). Written by a retired Navy SEAL named Clint Emerson, the illustrated book sits at the intersection of two staunchly American traditions: a love of vigilantism and a faith in the multiple uses of aluminum foil. Emerson is equipped with 20 years' experience conducting special ops while attached to SEAL teams and the N.S.A., according to the bio issued by his publisher. (Depending on your threshold for surveillance, this bio will either stoke your inner patriot or give you the willies.) He is the kind of individual who cannot visit a restaurant without scanning the landscape for threats, canvassing exits and cataloging potential improvised weapons, like a tabletop saltshaker (which can be used to temporarily blind an assailant, it turns out). He lives in Texas, because of course he does. The stated intent of his book is to provide guidance for civilians who find themselves in dire emergencies, and it opens with a salvo meant to inflame the latent paranoiac in us all: "Potential dangers lurk everywhere these days. Disasters strike in war-torn regions and far-flung locations - but with alarming regularity, they also seem to inch closer and closer to home." According to Emerson, battling these dangers is a matter of developing a set of practical skills and habits, such as wearing Kevlar shoelaces, carrying a covert mobile phone and brushing up on your Molotov cocktail recipe. (The secret ingredient is a fuel-soaked tampon.) In fact, what separates a Navy SEAL from the common civilian might be a distinct lack of squeamishness. Not only is Emerson blasé about inserting rectal concealments large enough to contain a map and a compass, but he also recommends stashing operational gear inside roadkill corpses, where nobody is likely to look for it. Unless, of course, they've also read his book. Tradecraft is a scintillating topic, and it's hard not to get high on Emerson's supply, even if the efficacy of his advice is impossible to verify. (In the acknowledgments, the author tips his hat to publication reviewers at the Pentagon, "who ferried the book through a complicated review process via a number of agencies," whatever that means.) And while most of the tips seem easy to implement - I can't wait to conduct mobile surveillance on my ex-boyfriend's commute or open a car door with a piece of string - other tips are subtly preposterous. "Every hotel room has a Bible or a Quran stashed in a bedside drawer," Emerson writes, "and taping a couple of those together yields a set of improvised body armor that provides significant protection against projectiles." O.K., but most hotel rooms only provide one Bible or Quran in the bedside drawer. Where am I going to find several? And how will I escape predators with a library of religious texts strapped to my body? Minor complaints, these. As Emerson concedes, there's no such thing as absolute preparedness. "100 Deadly Skills" turns the task at hand - transforming one-self into a human risk-management tool - into gleeful entertainment. The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip offers a second approach to risk: If you can't beat it, join it. FOOLPROOF: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe (Little, Brown, $28) follows a venerable tradition in its use of the rhetorical move known as antimetabole, in which two terms are reversed in mirroring phrases for jazzy effect. (Classic specimen: "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk.") "The history of civilization is the history of us trying to foolproof existence, to create safety and stability out of a dangerous and unstable world," Ip writes, before unfolding his thesis that the measures we take to avert risk - innovations like anti-lock brakes, football helmets and financial instruments designed to "hedge" risk - might contribute to the very disasters they've been developed to thwart, or perhaps spark exotic new types of disaster. Football helmets, for example: They prevent skull fractures, which is great, but they also allow players to use their heads as blunt instruments for bonking other players, which is less great. Ip also points to antibiotics, which save lives (great) but have also given rise to one of the scariest phrases in the English language: antibiotic-resistant bacteria (terrifying). "Foolproof" is an exploration, not a set of prescriptions for riding out the volatility, and the emergent theme - that life is a never-ending series of unintended consequences - is a bit of a bummer. Although probably a healthy bummer to consider. And then there is Richard Branson. The Virgin mogul is, in many ways, an openly ridiculous person - a cross between the Monopoly Man and David St. Hubbins from "This Is Spinal Tap." The hardcover edition of his latest book, THE VIRGIN WAY: Everything I Know About Leadership (Portfolio/Penguin, $29.95), depicts Branson grinning with one hip cocked and a finger alighting upon his goatee. He looks like a man who spends his millions the way many of us would like to spend millions if we had them: on tropical islands, luxury submarines, space tourism. He looks like a man with no concept of an "indoor voice." He does not look like a person who might set aside months for the laborious work of book writing - the introspection, the chapter-crafting, the fine-tuning of sentences. And yet Branson has what most prominent executives do not, which is a personality. And by some miracle of transmission, his wackiness makes its way onto the page with seemingly minimal tampering from ghostwriters and lawyers. In a section about the general uselessness of mission statements, he cheerfully disses Bristol-Myers Squibb and Yahoo - one for using bland language in a statement, the other for corporate messaging that Branson describes, rather beautifully, as "flowery waffle." He prefers to work from a hammock. At a reception to celebrate his airline's inaugural flight into the New York area, he mistook the mayor of Newark for a caterer and asked him for more shrimp. If the Virgin group had a motto, Branson writes, it would be "Screw It, Let's Do It." Beneath the swagger, however, is a man who gives pretty solid advice about how to conduct oneself in an office environment. Write short emails. Try to remember faces. Don't interrupt. Never begin a sentence with, "You're not going to like this but...." And when someone says, "I hear you," it means he is not listening. Too true. There are plenty of moments when Branson sounds like every chest-thumping C.E.O. on earth. "Everything that's really worthwhile in life usually involves some degree of risk," he writes. Then again, the man's résumé has both the booms (Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records) and busts (Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides) to prove his commitment to dice-rolling. When a high-level employee refers to Branson as a "nutcase," Branson's first instinct isn't to fire the guy. It's to quote him in Chapter 13. MOLLY YOUNG writes Critical Shopper columns for The Times and features for New York magazine.

Hansen, a former Navy SEAL who now runs the appropriately named Escape the Wolf security consulting form, offers his catalog of survival tactics that are based on his being what the SEALs dub a "Violent Nomad"-someone who is creatively adept at confronting any predator or crisis. His skills, including "Defeat a Padlock," "Escape from an Ambush," and even "Dispose of a Dead Body," are described in facing pages of text and graphical illustration in a manner reminiscent of the popular "Worst Case Scenario" series. A glossary and references list are provided. VERDICT Emerson offers a solid (if scary) addition to the survival guide collections. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.