Last Chance to See By Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.

Douglas Adams is a name you're likely to be hearing a lot about at the moment, since the long-awaited film of his incredible successful book The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy is around the corner.

However, many of you may not know that Mr Adams was in fact passionately interested in all sorts of subjects, not least of which was zoology, and more precisely nearly extinct species. In this book, written originally in the 1980's, he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine to travel around the world and meet several such nearly extinct species.

For anyone who has read any previous works, you'll be pleased to know you're in familiar territory. Douglas Adams is incapable of writing so much as a paragraph without a good joke in it, and when presented by the various near-lunatics, sorry, emient zoologists who are doing their best to keep such creatures as the New Zealand Kakapo alive his natural wit and flair comes out. This book is screamingly funny.

Adams ranges from New Zealand, to China, African and the Galapagos Islands, home of the Komodo Dragon. In some cases he is badly disappointed by what he finds, but in every case he does indeed find the animal he's looking for. This, in itself is quite remarkable, given that in some cases there were only twelve of that animal in the world at the time.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in Douglas Adams, conservation issues, zoology, or frankly, just a good read about an interesting subject.