Last Chance to See

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.