Mark Carwardine

How can a book be so grim and sad but still be laugh-out-loud funny? Such was the genius of Douglas Adams. With zoologist Mark Carwardine, Adams travels the world to spot endangered animals for a BBC radio program. Amidst the hilarious travel stories and sly jabs at human behavior runs the tragic thread of how stupidly short-sighted people are when they don’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone.

This wildlife conservation travelogue is the result of BBC's asking Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine to travel around the world in search of endangered creatures. If you have an interest in conservation, this should already be on your list, but if you don't, this should really be on your list, not only because we should all be interested in life here on our earth but because Douglas Adams is one of the funniest people ever to have walked on its surface. You'd think talking about show more dying species would be dry and sad, but I think Adams could make an obituary a good laugh and it is to his credit that he never lets the humor outshine the actual topic and his accolades of the people who struggle every day to keep species alive for coming generations is always more than apt. I wish the book had more photos, but that's a small complaint and there are plenty available from other sources. show less

Douglas Adams was, of course, the famous humorous science fiction writer. Last Chance to See is one of his lesser known works though really deserves much more recognition. Adams teams up with biologist Mark Carwardine to travel to different parts of the planet in search of endangered species - see find them before they go extinct.

This book was remarkably bittersweet. It is slyly funny, with Adams' characteristic ability to wring humor from circumstance, whether it was about snake anti-venom, show more trying to find condoms to create a makeshift underwater microphone, or the author's nervousness about China. I smiled and laughed reading his and Carwardine (and the revolving BBC audio tech who ended up on their trips)'s adventures. At the same time, the book was incredibly sad because I was keenly aware that since its publications, we have lost at least one of species that Adams and Carwardine looked for, the Baiji aka the Yangtze River Dolphin which, if not actually extinct, is at least functionally extinct. I fear that other species mentioned in the book may soon follow.

Still, Adams doesn't preach or lecture. He instead entertains and through that entertainment creates teachable moments. I am incredibly impressed that throughout the book, he never lapsed into soapboxing about the need to protect any of the species, but instead lays out the uphill battle that those working on those species face and that these handful of species mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg.

A very short but powerful book that made me think Adams was wasted on science fiction, and that he should have really done more science writing or travelogues. Here is where he really shines. show less

A fun and insightful read, and I suspect for all that not a book to win new readers. Either you pick it up as a Douglas Adams fan, or as someone interested in getting a boots-on-the-ground peek into specific efforts involving endangered species. Possibly both. For either sort, Adams provides not merely a journeyman's account but an enjoyable tutorial. It reads as though he wrote it that way, too: Don't let the book get in the way of the task, as it were, focus on getting the story right more show more than publishing his next bestseller.

Adams's tone and narrative voice are key to this achievement. His first couple chapters suggest something recognisably conversational as if from Hitchhiker, though with fewer tangents and less bizarre flights of fancy. A sound decision as there is plenty of the bizarre embedded in the environmental stories he tells. Adams avoids veering into the overly comic, something I'd expect of Dave Barry. Adams, on the contrary, modulates his tone to capture the pathos of his story, a dimension only tangentially evident in Hitchhikers'.

The stories here aren't terribly complex, their challenge is becoming better known. Adams helps address this simply by agreeing to make the trip and write it up: his celebrity, presumably, will help spread the word. show less