The author
Dr. Buck Savage†
†not a doctor. This is printed on all ten covers, in a footnote, in the smallest type the printer would agree to.
No parent named a child Buck Savage. We asked him for two hundred words and a photograph. He sent nine hundred words, no photograph, and a note reading use it as written. We have used it as written. The drawing we commissioned ourselves.
Dr. Buck Savage has crossed the Sonoran on foot. He has crossed it twice. The second crossing was in a rented sedan with the air conditioning on and does not count, though he counts it.
He has taken large fish from cold water and small fish from warm water and he prefers the cold water. It is harder. A man is entitled to say a thing was hard.
He keeps sixty-three gallons in a hall closet on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, and he has carried every gallon of it up himself. That is the only sentence in this paragraph a reader should envy.
He has never been lost. He has been, on four occasions, somewhere other than where he intended, for a period, without a map. That is a different thing, and the difference is the whole series.
He drinks whiskey in the evening and coffee in the morning and does not confuse the two. He considers this a qualification. It is not one.
He has read every safety standard he cites, cover to cover, including the tables. This is true. It is the only line here he can prove, and he resents that anybody asked.
— Dr. Buck Savage, on Dr. Buck Savage
Two things in that are load-bearing
Both are at the end, which is where he put them, which tells you something about the man.
He is not a doctor
Every cover says so. He is a fictional narrator whose credentials cannot be verified, up to and including the name. Nothing in these books is medical, legal or structural advice, and the one on first aid says so twice.
He has read the standards
That part is not a bit. Every safety-critical figure across all ten volumes is sourced, and where a mistake maims or kills the comedy stops mid-paragraph and the prose goes flat. The contempt is a performance. The instructions are not.
About the borrowed voice
He would call it homage. His editor calls it something else, at length, in the margins, in a hand he claims he cannot read. Both are correct. The short sentences are load-bearing for a different reason than the one he thinks: instructions that might be read by torchlight, at speed, by somebody frightened, should be short.
The full argument for how the books are built is on how these are made. The reference material is published free on field notes, so the manual can be checked before the joke is bought.