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kareila_books2024-12-01 10:43 pm
kareila) wrote in kareila_books2024-12-01 10:43 pm
#42: Douglas Adams with Mark Carwardine, Last Chance to See [JRI]
I finished reading this last month but waited to review it until I had also finished watching the 6 episode miniseries of the same name, filmed 20 years later with Stephen Fry taking the "bemused Brit" role.
The TV series does more to showcase the various critically endangered species and the people who are trying to save them, so it is superior in that sense. But the book contains some of Adams' best comedy writing, made all the funnier by being nonfiction.
I attended a lecture Douglas Adams gave at MIT less than a year before he died. I rushed there straight from work, I didn't bring any of his books with me to get signed, and I just wasn't in the right headspace to appreciate it at the time... but I remember that he came with the promise that he could talk about anything he liked, and he talked about this book. He really cared about conservation.
Unfortunately, of the 6 species profiled in the book, one had already been declared extinct by the time the Fry series was filmed, and I believe at least one more is all but gone now.
(And yes, I saved this entry for #42 on purpose.)
The TV series does more to showcase the various critically endangered species and the people who are trying to save them, so it is superior in that sense. But the book contains some of Adams' best comedy writing, made all the funnier by being nonfiction.
I attended a lecture Douglas Adams gave at MIT less than a year before he died. I rushed there straight from work, I didn't bring any of his books with me to get signed, and I just wasn't in the right headspace to appreciate it at the time... but I remember that he came with the promise that he could talk about anything he liked, and he talked about this book. He really cared about conservation.
Unfortunately, of the 6 species profiled in the book, one had already been declared extinct by the time the Fry series was filmed, and I believe at least one more is all but gone now.
(And yes, I saved this entry for #42 on purpose.)
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weirdly I was just thinking about this book yesterday, I don't recall why.
ohhh yeah it's because I was wondering if Adams would have gone milkshake duck if he'd lived, and then I remembered Last Chance To See and was reassured that he wouldn't have.
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Last Chance to See was a great book. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook read by Adams himself, years ago.
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