Ben Sherwood knows survival. The L.A. Times writer and author of the Man Who Ate the 747 has interviewed people from all over the world to find out just how people survived the most harrowing experiences a human can endure—from the Holocaust to mountain lion attacks.

Sherwood uses two important questions to frame each worst-case scenario: What does it really take to survive a catastrophic event? and What kind of survivor are you? He highlights the different types of strategies people have used to survive through life’s toughest (and most bizarre) challenges but also stresses that it’s often pure gut instinct that helps many people make it through these ordeals alive.

You’ll also learn some very strange but true advice about where to be in danger. For example, Sherwood discusses the best place you could possibly be to have a heart attack as well as the safest seat to sit in when you’re flying in an airplane. (Sherwood tells us that we only have 90 seconds to leave a plan crash before the cabin temperature can no longer be survived by humans.) Optimism, or at least blind optimism, can also be fatal; Sherwood explains that most survivors of war camps were those who realized that they would be a prisoner for a long time—rather than clinging to the hope of an eventual rescue—and devised their own coping mechanisms.

Did you know that your own birthday could be dangerous to your health—while being religious, whether you shun the idea or not, can actually make you live longer? The experts and survivors that Sherwood has interviewed has led him to some startling conclusions about human psychology, behavior, genetics, and more—and especially how and why we manage to survive dangerous situations.

Later in the book, Sherwood provides a Web site where readers can go online and test their own survival profiles to see how well they might do in scary situations. We learn in the book that some people are simply better at surviving than others, which isn’t a surprise; after all, how else has every species on earth made it through one century after another? But Sherwood’s main emphasis is on what surviving is—and that is the way you see the world at large. Science, self-help, and human interest call come together to form this provocative and informative book about what it takes to be a survivor.