Non-Business Book: Last Chance To See by Douglas Adams

In summer, I advocate for your non-business book reading to be a good travel book, preferably with a few laughs in it. And the best of all possible travel books, in many ways, is the classic Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See. It is also a book that reminds us that we are living on a fragile plant full of ridiculously amazing things that are worth saving, so if you need to rationalize time spent with this book, there you go.

Whether you are great at travel or not, whether you are doing environmental travel or cultural travel, this book has you covered. Douglas Adams has probably had an experience which was worse than yours, or at least funnier, or at least he found a way to make it seem worse and funnier.

I have a cheerfully reckless view of this kind of air travel. It rarely bothers me at all. I don’t think this is bravery, because I am frequently scared stiff in cars, particularly if I’m driving. But once you’re in an airplane, everything is completely out of your hands, so you may as well just sit back and grin manically about the grinding and rattling noises the old wreck of a plane makes as the turbulence throws it around the sky. There’s nothing you can do.

This is a kind of resilience, and we can apply it to all sorts of situations. We are, I think Adams always felt, generally silly as a species, and we take ourselves much much too seriously. But while we are doing all that taking ourselves seriously, we can do extraordinary things and we can make extraordinary differences in the world. This book is a love story to the people who do that, and it is one of the best things he wrote in his far too short life.

I met him on the book tour for this book. We all came, armed with our towels and much loved copies of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy, wanting to talk about silly things. And we went away so moved by what we was trying to do with this book, which was bring important stories to us all in his own way.

We can all do this. We can all find ways to use our talents to shed light on things that matter. He wrote this more than 30 years ago, it is even more true today. But as Mary Anna?se Heglar said "Even if I can only save a sliver of what is precious to me, that will be my sliver and I will cherish it. If I can salvage just one blade of grass, I will do it. I will make a world out of it. And I will live in it and for it."

“There is no "tropical island paradise" I know of which remotely matches up to the fantasy ideal that such a phrase is meant to conjure up, or even to what we find described in holiday brochures. It's natural to put this down to the discrepancy we are all used to finding between what advertisers promise and what the real world delivers. It doesn't surprise us much any more. So it can come as a shock to realise that the world we hear described by travellers of previous centuries (or even previous decades) and biologists of today really did exist. The state it's in now is only the result of what we've done to it, and the mildness of the disappointment we feel when we arrive somewhere and find that it's a bit tatty is only a measure of how far our own expectations have been degraded and how little we understand what we've lost. The people who do understand what we've lost are the ones who are rushing around in a frenzy trying to save the bits that are left.”