Douglas Adams’ most important book?

 Last Chance to See is arguably Douglas Adams most important book. (A solid argument can be made for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in either radio or book form, since that’s what gave him the license to ignore deadlines) It is definitely his most serious work.

Last Chance to See is a non-fiction book, adapted from a radio series of the same name. It describes how Adams, photographer Mark Carwadine and whatever producer the BBC dragged in went on a series of trips to see critically endangered species.

The irony of using entertainment to try and help species that are only endangered because of the human race is not lost on Adams.

In fact, the book is less any kind of scientific documentation than it is a travelogue. Scratch that. It is totally a travelogue. Adams spends many more pages describing what it took for them to get to the animals than the animals than themselves.

This is not a critique. This is not a flaw. By writing the book this way, Adams shifts the discussion away from the animals endangered with extinction and focuses on what is endangering them. You know, us.

The writing alternates between talking about the silly things people do and ‘my God, look what we’ve done’ Which makes the book alternate between rather funny and breathtakingly bleak. And the last chapter, on the island of Mauritius where the dodo lived until they didn’t and quite a few other species are highly endangered, it gets quite bleak.

Last Chance to See was published in 1990. It would be nice to think that it is a time capsule and things have gotten better for endangered species. Sadly, when the BBC did a follow-up TV series to the radio series twenty years later, some of the species had become extinct in that time. Most of the others aren’t doing that great either.

Last Chance to See isn’t a look at the world thirty years ago. It remains a sadly timely as ever mirror to look at ourselves.