Help! Quicksand!

By Nadya Labi/Philadelphia

The key is to know your enemy.

If a raging bull is bearing down on you, don't run away. Strip. Whip off your shirt and dangle it away from your body.

With a mountain lion, on the other hand, try intimidation. Again, don't run. Instead, flash him. Hold your coat open so that you appear larger than you actually are.

But if you're dealing with a swarm of killer bees, don't attempt to outsmart them. If you leap into a nearby swamp to escape them, they'll be waiting for you when you come up for air. This time...run!

So goes some of the advice in The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (Chronicle Books; 176 pages; $14.95), an improbable how-to manual that recently has been climbing the paperback nonfiction best-seller list and is now in its eighth printing. In addition to bad animal encounters, it probes life-threatening predicaments you'll almost certainly never face. For examples, the book offers straight-faced tips on how to escape quicksand (don't fight it, float on it); how to survive if your parachute fails to open (if a fellow skydiver is nearby--and that's one big if--grab him); and for those who share Pedro Almodovar's concerns, how to deliver a baby in a moving vehicle (support the baby's head and tie the umbilical cord with a shoelace).

The idea for the guide came to David Borgenicht, 31, a Philadelphia writer, as he lay awake one night pondering exactly how to go about landing a pilotless plane. (Such conundrums plague Borgenicht. One of his earlier works is The Little Book of Stupid Questions.) He went looking for a partner in neurosis and found Joshua Piven, 28. The two have much in common: both are Philadelphians who went to the University of Pennsylvania, and both survived a formative experience with crime. A decade ago, shortly after moving from Utah to Philadelphia, the amiable Borgenicht was conned out of $500. And while on vacation in Jamaica, Piven was chased by knife-wielding motorcyclists. They were after his gold signet class ring, and when he refused to hand it over, Piven says, they left.

Borgenicht and Piven consulted hundreds of experts, among them demolition-derby drivers, wilderness survivalists and emergency medics, to come up with accurate solutions to the 40 scenarios in the book. While they enjoyed exploring their inner MacGyvers, they don't plan to test-run their material. "You might survive but end up with some kind of disfiguring injury," says Borgenicht. For example, the manual carefully lays out the best procedure for jumping from a building into a Dumpster before noting, under "Be Aware," that "the Dumpster may be filled with bricks or other unfriendly materials." In the chapter describing how to wrestle free from an alligator, the authors explain that you should tap the creature on the snout "if its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb)."

Most of us will never have to escape from a sinking car or figure out how to get down from the top of a moving train, but that doesn't mean we can't worry about it. Y2K was a bust, but anxiety is still America's leading psychiatric disorder. "We're living in about the safest times in human history, yet people seem to be more afraid than ever before," says Barry Glassner, a sociologist and the author of The Culture of Fear. "This book works right off the prevailing ethos that you should be afraid of all the wrong things." A sequel is expected next year. The Worst-Case Scenario Travel Handbook will cover such things as hostage situations and civil unrest. Meanwhile the Survival Handbook is generating other spin-offs, including a calendar that lists such notable milestones as when the first blood transfusion was administered and when Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed.

Not all readers are simply indulging their neuroses. As the preface warns, "You just never know." A satisfied customer posted the following tale on Amazon.com in January. He bought the book for his girlfriend to read while she was recovering from a car accident. As her run of bad luck would have it, she was later trapped inside her house as it burned down. Recalling the book's advice on "How to Break Down a Door," she kicked the lock and made like Houdini. True story or MacGyver fantasy? You just never know.