In which Douglas Adams, author of [b:The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy|11|The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1)|Douglas Adams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531891848l/11._SY75_.jpg|3078186] and [b:Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency|365|Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1)|Douglas Adams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554401296l/365._SY75_.jpg|1042123], is escorted by zoologist Mark Carwardine to some remote parts of the world in order to see and report on various endangered species. They visit:

• the aye-aye lemur (Madagascar)

• the man-eating dragon lizard (Komodo, Indonesia)

• the mountain gorilla and northern white rhinoceros (Zaïre)

• the kākāpō flightless parrot (New Zealand)

• the baiji river dolphin (China)

• the Rodrigues fruit bat, Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon, and echo parakeet (Mauritius)

What Adams produced at the end of this expedition was a half-humorous, half-serious travel-and-nature book (mainly humorous about the travel, mainly serious about the animals): the sort of thing Gerald Durrell used to write. It’s very readable, amusing in places, and quite interesting. Even if you’re not particularly interested in animals, you can read it as a travel book.

It includes 66 good-quality colour photos illustrating the text: animals, people, and landscape.

Of the species mentioned in the book, according to Wikipedia in 2024 the northern white rhinoceros is now critically endangered (possibly extinct in the wild); the kākāpō flightless parrot is critically endangered; the baiji river dolphin is possibly extinct.

The aye-aye, the Komodo dragon, the mountain gorilla, and the Rodrigues fruit bat are still endangered.

The Mauritius kestrel was reduced to a population of 4 in 1974, but deliberate conservation efforts restored the population to about 400 by 2019. The pink pigeon and echo parakeet have also recovered from critically endangered to merely vulnerable. ( )

Thirty‑plus years ago Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame and Mark Carwardine, a wildlife zoologist and photographer, set out to find some of the rarest creatures on earth before it was too late and document their encounters with them. This book is a result of that expedition. There are touches of the absurd humor and satire in it that Adams was well known for but what stands out is his insightful commentary about the reasons the creatures became endangered in the first place. I had planned to follow this up with Stephen Fry’s 2009 book, Last Chance to See: In the Footsteps of Douglas Adams but now I’m going to wait because I know it will suffer in comparison. ( )

Douglas Adams' inimitable style shines through in a book that's engaging, funny, yet ultimately depressing.

It's interesting because of the exotic locales, the zany characters, and the situations that Adams finds himself in. Even more so, it's the way Adams perceives them that steals the show. His trademark humor shines through every page (well, page turn in my case) that I read.

The animals were easily the stars of the show. Their situations are dire, more so now than ever before. He draws on his experience to educate and offer insight into their plights and the ways we can help them. And it's for that reason the book is depressing: the world is going to hell, and we are to blame for it. :( ( )

Nobody writes like Douglas Adams writes. He's one of the few guys that can have me laughing uproariously while also pondering something deep and important. Or pondering the sad legacy of humans while laughing. Or shaking my head at the sheer stupidity of humans.

That being said, while there are many funny moments in this book, overall, it's heartbreaking book to read. In anyone else's hands, I believe it would have been pleadingly maudlin.

With Adams, instead, it's hopeful.

Nobody writes like Douglas Adams writes. I miss him. ( )

Douglas Adams, the witty author of the hilarious series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, joins forces with zoologist Mark Carwardine to travel around the world. They visit the darkest parts of Africa to the lush island of Mauritius and some places in between to find and photograph animals that are endangered and close to extinction.

The duo visit the elusive silverback gorillas in Zaire and are astonished at how human-like our distance ancestors are, noting one of the apes contemplating life as it lay on the ground looking at a swaying leaf blowing in the wind. They also visit the creepy looking aye-aye, the dangerous Komodo dragon, the chubby flightless Kakapo parrot and the rare northern white rhino. Their travels allows them to also visit other animals as well.

If you are familiar with Douglas Adams then you should be familiar with his witty, sarcastic and his British dry humor. There were parts where I laughed out loud at the adventures these guys would come across as they made there way around the different countries. Other chapters will make you feel guilty and a bit ashamed of what our fellow humans have done in the past concerning the health and safety of our fellow animal friends.

Adams is very descriptive and you can almost feel as if you are right next to him on this journey. I googled some of the animals and while most of them did manage to thrive thanks to the efforts of the hard working conservationists and other groups however one of the species was sadly listed "functionally extinct" which means that if any are left at all, there isn't enough in the population to sustain them for much longer before they are fully gone.

Global warming and the continuous burning of fossil fuels increases the likely-hood that more species may become lost forever unless we can come together and continue to do our part with maintaining the jungles and forests and oceans of our planet. Let's try to not add any more animals to the endangered list and learn from our mistakes! ( )

This book was fascinating. Douglas shines when he is describing the people places, and situations encountered during the quest to see endangered animals all over the world. I laughed out loud when he described his aftershave purchases on the plane to China, and Mark’s dry comments on marking territory with scent. I was glad that Mark added an epilogue with updates on all the stories. ( )

Fantastic book! Inspirational details on the heroic efforts that were made to save the animals mentioned in this book! ( )

Amazing. I love all of Douglas Adams' work. This is particularly poignant. I wish the audiobook that he narrated was more readily available. ( )

So, shortly after Dirk Gently's second novel, Douglas Adams takes off across the world with a zoologist and, together with a ton of misadventures and great photographs, they meet dragons, tough-skinned 17-month gestating aliens, birds that have forgotten how to forget how to hit the ground, and we learn that DNA has a major *issue* with aftershave.

Multiple aftershaves. *shudder*

Back in the day, I saw this book in the bookstores and I said to myself... "Hey! Buddy! Where's the next fiction novel? I mean, sure, raising awareness for animals that are on the way to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe IS a good cause, but I WANT MY FICTION."

And so I took thirty years to get around to reading this.

I feel slightly bad. This is a shame-read. The book has shamed me on many levels while making me laugh.

Well! At least there's that!
( )

So British. So many adverbs. Coming off the David Mitchell audiobook I wonder if Cambridge teaches editing because the "well what have you and that rather sort of thing" talk takes up a lot of space. Lucky for me I find British men reassuring and grandfatherly & their excess verbiage charming. It's like sitting in someone's lap. A nice book about sad things with many strong opinions, petty quarrels, peevish asides, and misadventures in bureaucracy and inconvenience. This lacks the grandeur of, say, Peter Matthiessen but makes up for it with a good sense of humor and neat cover art that looks like a Henri Rousseau piece. BTW I don't wish extinction upon any animal species but from what I've read the Yangtze dolphin is better off now, poor guys. ( )

This is an interesting book written with a lot of humor but still a sense of awe at the creatures and the exotic parts of the world the two authors visit in search of rare and endangered species. Since I am probably not going to get to go find a mountain gorilla or a Komondo dragon, I really enjoyed reading about the whole trip, the good, the bad and the ugly because Douglas Adams made it so amusing yet serious at the same time. We are losing these wonderful species and their habitats. Who knows when will be the last time they are seen? ( )

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 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. ( )

I don't have too many words to describe the book, just my recommendation to read and savor. ( )

Douglas Adams is familiar to most of us from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its many sequels. With the same sarcastic humor that Adams has drawn us into distant worlds, he presents us with this world. Adams goes out with biologist Mark Caraviden on a quest for endangered animals all over the planet. He is exposed to the richness of the species on Earth and to the danger in which they exist. His descriptions of the animals and their customs often caused me to burst into wild laughter, as well as descriptions of the absurd situations that the human environment provides. This is an essential book to increase public awareness of the largest and fastest species extinction in the history of the Earth, which occurs because of human action. Adams' excellent writing, with the professional information of Caravadin, creates a productive and enjoyable book. ( )

Sci-fi author (famous for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) travels the world to view some of the most endangered animals on the planet, before they are gone. He goes to Madagascar to see the aye-aye, to Komodo for the iconic giant lizards, to Zaire for the mountain gorillas and northern white rhino (there were twenty living at the time), to New Zealand in hopes of finding a kakapo, to China in search of the Yangtze river dolphin, to Mauritius to see the Rodrigues fruit bat and some endangered birds as well. Some of these he just caught a glimpse of (the aye-aye), other animals he was able to observe up close. I was surprised what a fun read this was, in spite of its grave subject matter- it's kind of a wild travelogue, and the author's humor in describing situations frequently sparked a laugh. To note, in the years since this book was written, the river dolphin is presumed extinct.... When I read this book I was impressed at the actions the Chinese took to save the river dolphin, but it wasn't enough. Similar book, although now outdated in terms of the animals' predicament (and not nearly as enjoyable a read) : Wild Echoes by Charles Bergman.

from the Dogear Diary ( )

Read this upon recommendation of Syl, I'd only read the Dirk Gently and Hitchhikers books previously. What a pleasure to read a more autobiographical account from Douglas Adams as he and zoologist Mark Carwardine trek the globe in 1988 to find some of the world's rarest species or, the last chance to see them. Really bummed out to read the section about the baiji in China, though, because it was declared functionally extinct back in 2006, alas. ( )

Adams schreibt dieses Buch nicht nur amüsant, sondern das Schönste daran ist, dass es auch noch reflektiert und einfühlsam geschrieben ist.
So schwankt es zwischen amüsantem Reisebericht und tiefgreifenden Fragestellungen, die der Leser mit sich selbst ausmachen muss.
Dabei habe ich nicht das Gefühl, dass es belehrend oder mit einem erhobenen Zeigefinger geschrieben ist, jedoch trotzdem eindringlich klargemacht wird, dass diese Arten geschützt werden müssen, und dass man Respekt und Mitgefühl mit Tieren haben sollte.

Auf Wikipedia habe ich gelesen, dass es auch eine Dokumentation mit Stephen Fry gibt, die nach dem Tod von Adams den aktuellen Stand der ausgestorbenen Tierarten überprüft. Nach diesem Buch würde ich die Dokumentation gerne auch anschauen. ( )

Douglas Adams is, of course, most famous for his work on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, but if there was one piece not related to HHGTTG by DNA that I wish people would read, it would be this one.

Mr. Adams was deeply fascinated with the natural world, and this love for the world around him absolutely shines through in this book, wherein Mr. Adams records his experienced traveling the world, encountering various endangered species in their natural habitat. His wonderful observational skills, and more importantly, incredible talent for putting those observations on paper in his wry, witty way, allow him to truly draw the reader into his experiences, and to feel his awe and reverence for the things he, well, had a rare chance to see.

At once sad and hopeful, I think some of his best writing is done in this volume.

Mr. Adams has said he was most proud of this book. If you ask me, he was right to be. ( )

"Very funny and moving...The glimpses of rare fauna seem to have enlarged [Adams'] thinking, enlivened his world; and so might the animals do for us all, if we were to help them live."
THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD
Join bestselling author Douglas Adams and zooligist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures. Hilarious and poignant--as only Douglas Adams can be--LAST CHANCE TO SEE is an entertaining and arresting odyssey through the Earth's magnificent wildlife galaxy.

One of those special books that, when you finish, you immediately want to find someone who hasn't read it, and press it into there hands, murmuring insistently, "you have to read this!"

I'm a big Douglas Adams fan. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is one of my all-time favourite series, and the Dirk Gently mysteries aren't far behind. When I set-up my Pantheon list of literary gods, Douglas Adams came straight in at Number 2 (behind Terry Pratchett) - and Last Chance to See was the one, key book that I hadn't read of his.

I found reading this a surprisingly emotional experience. I mean... Adams' voice is so strong in all his work, and within a couple of paragraphs I felt like I was back in his presence... a twelve year old boy sneaking the lamp back on after my parents had gone away, to read just one more chapter... and I felt that wave of grief wash over me again, just like the day I heard that he'd died. But... he's funny, and bright and grumpy and... just brilliant! I was sad to be reminded that he had passed away, but I was also hugely entertained and delighted that, despite being a non-fiction, this was every bit as good as his wildly imaginative speculative fiction.

This is 30% ecology novel about endangered species, and 70% travel book about the adventures of a cranky, middle-aged Brit travelling to far-flung lands to visit said endangered species.

The 30% is fascinating and the 70% kept me grinning.

Some of the phrases have embedded themselves in my head... I will always think of rhinos as "nimble young volkswagens", and kakopos as the birds that have "forgotten that they've forgotten how to fly".

One of those special books that, when you finish, you immediately want to find someone who hasn't read it, and press it into there hands, murmuring insistently, "you have to read this!"

Even writing this review makes me want to go and re-read Dirk Gently...

A fantastic and interesting book for anyone who loves Douglas Adams, the environment, humor, geography, or animals. ( )

I read "Last Chance to See" back when it was first published and found myself depressed over the state of the world and how all these wonderful animals the book covers were facing extinction. Now, even more so am I depressed, for not only in the intervening quarter century have we seen some of the species covered in "Last Chance ..." become extinct, such as the Yangtze Dolphin, but the author Douglas Adams faced his own extinction event.

"Last Chance to see" covers Adams and Cawardine travelling the world searching for endangered animals and providing sobering statistics about the decline of species as well as some laughs. ( )

Good, but old book on conservation. Very entertaining to read Douglas Adams in a travelogue fashion--very funny, self-deprecating, and reflective of how much alcohol was consumed. Interesting to compare the animals Adams writes about in 1990 to their status today. Most are still here, but still endangered. Good read for anyone interested in conservation or Douglas Adams. ( )

In 1985 Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine set off in the hope of spotting the Madagascar aye-aye, a nocturnal lemur nearing extinction. The trip was a success and so the duo came back together a couple years later to seek out more animals that were verging on the brink with the idea that their travels and Adams' writing would shine a much needed spotlight on said brink.

Like the Madagascar aye aye, my encounter with Adams' Last Chance to See adventuring was a nocturnal one. In simplicity, I couldn't put it down. The spotlight shone in Adams' humor and intellect, both fleshing out the weight of their experience. That it mattered to him, moved him.

I could go on about Douglas-Adams-as-a-synonym-for-brilliancy but it's been done. What I will say is that I love reading Adams because he seems to have been gifted with the rare ability to see the world from a slightly removed angle than the rest and the even rarer ability to translate such a view to those of us unaware.

This is an important book; a swollen, dog-eared, in peril of a broken spine book. A pass-it-on book.
( )

"I have a terrible feeling that we are in trouble.". This book originally published in 1990 has Douglas and Mark on this journey throughout the world to show us some of the efforts being made to save endangered species from extintion. Written by Adams this book has unique style it's comical, clever, thought-provoking and at the same time informative. Not being the specialist myself, like Adams, I have the impression that although the animals and the nature have suffered from our presence and might even disappear the "human race" is the one who might end it up sooner than later. ( )

This is a reread of a book that is somewhat dated but still interesting thanks to Douglas Adams' descriptions of the scenery, wildlife and assorted humans that he and Mark meet on their journey. My favourite chapter was the one about the kakapo, which is now my favourite bird. It is so adorable and innocent-looking. (Of course, those who followed Mark Carwardine's and Stephen Fry's update of this book will know that the kakapo can also be a bit amorous toward humans if it has been imprinted by humans from birth…) I also liked the chapter on the mountain gorillas and Douglas's thoughts on the differences and similarities between our two species.

This is worth reading if you like Douglas Adams, are interested in the recent history of animal conservation, or saw the follow-up series and want to know what things were like when the original book was written. ( )