Guest Author - MaryEllen Schoeman
This is my very favorite book regarding endangered species and the environment, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in these topics, and to anyone who simply enjoys a well-written and very entertaining book. The two authors travel the world, visiting endangered species in their native environments and talking to experts about each animal, explaining how each animal came to be endangered and what is being done about it. Although the book was published in 1990, it is still topical, and the BBC recently announced that they have begun filming a TV series based on the book, which will star Mark Carwardine and British TV and movie star Stephen Fry. The show will update the information on the animals in the book and also visit new animals and environments throughout the world, and is scheduled to start airing in autumn 2009.
Douglas Adams probably describes the book best when he explains, “Mark is an extremely experienced and knowledgeable zoologist … and his role was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be the extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.”
From this premise leads this remarkable book, which is part zoology, part conservation, part travelogue, part philosophical meditation on life, and completely engaging. The authors visit animals both commonly known, such as the Komodo Dragon, and completely obscure, such as the Kakapo, a large flightless parrot native to New Zealand. In between visiting these and other animals in their natural environment, the authors deal with surly travel agents, impenetrable bureaucracy, and travel plans that never go quite as expected. The book also features marvelous photos with captions by Douglas Adams – a photo of the tail of a Komodo Dragon sticking out of a burrow reads: “A Komodo Dragon sleeping headfirst in a large burrow. It is a very, very, very bad idea to even think of pulling its tail.”
Mark Carwardine is a well-known naturalist and writer, a former Conservation Officer for the World Wildlife Fund, and author of The Encyclopedia of World Wildlife, Birds in Focus, the Animal Atlas, and many other books - over 50 books total. He is also an award-winning wildlife photographer, very popular public speaker, and an internationally recognized expert on conservation issues. He is one of the most respected figures in zoology today, and on top of that he also leads whale-watching trips in Baja California.
The late Douglas Adams was most well-known for his comic sci-fi series of books, “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, as well as the Dirk Gently comic detective series. But to describe his work as merely ‘comic’ fails to capture the genius of his way with words and his deep understanding of how the human psyche works. His writing is almost always hilarious, but is also at times unbearably poignant. His work in Last Chance to See is perhaps the finest example of his ability to blend those two styles into a book that is hopeful, heartbreaking, and humorous by turn.
