Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine

He found the last ones. Some are gone now. He was funny about it.

For you if

you want someone to make you laugh about extinction until you realize the laughter is the only thing standing between you and the full weight of what is being lost

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$17 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine traveled to the most remote corners of the planet in 1988-89 to find animals on the verge of extinction — the Kakapo in New Zealand, the Komodo dragon in Indonesia, the Yangtze river dolphin in China, the Northern white rhino in Zaire, the Aye-aye in Madagascar. Adams brought his full Hitchhiker's Guide register — the comedy of incompetence, the comedy of bureaucracy, the comedy of a man fundamentally unsuited to fieldwork repeatedly attempting fieldwork — and used it to make an argument that earnest nature writing cannot quite make: that we are intelligent enough to understand exactly what we are doing to these animals and we are doing it anyway, and that this specific combination of intelligence and indifference is the funniest and most terrible thing about our species. The title is the argument. You are reading about animals you will probably never see because humanity has decided their habitat is more valuable as something else. Several of the species Adams and Carwardine visited are now extinct. The Yangtze river dolphin was declared functionally extinct in 2006. Adams died in 2001 at 49 and never saw the follow-up television series Stephen Fry made by returning to the same locations. The companion to Fathoms and Cod on the shelf — Giggs renders the grief lyrically, Kurlansky documents the extraction historically, Adams makes you laugh until you realize you are also crying.

Where This Book Lives