The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures, by William deBuys
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The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures, by William deBuys
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An award-winning author's quest to find and understand a creature as rare and enigmatic as any on EarthIn 1992, in a remote mountain range, a team of scientists discovered the remains of an unusual animal with exquisite long horns. It turned out to be a living species new to Western science--a saola, the first large land mammal discovered in fifty years.Rare then and rarer now, a live saola had never been glimpsed by a Westerner in the wild when Pulitzer Prize finalist and nature writer William deBuys and conservation biologist William Robichaud set off to search for it in central Laos. Their team endured a punishing trek up and down white-water rivers and through mountainous terrain ribboned with the snare lines of armed poachers who roamed the forest, stripping it of wildlife. In the tradition of Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, and Peter Matthiessen, The Last Unicorn chronicles deBuys's journey deep into one of the world's most remote places. It's a story rich with the joys and sorrows of an expedition into undiscovered country, pursuing a species as rare and elusive as the fabled unicorn. As is true with the quest for the unicorn, in the end the expedition becomes a search for something more: the essence of wildness in nature, evidence that the soul of a place can endure, and the transformative power of natural beauty.
The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures, by William deBuys- Amazon Sales Rank: #835225 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Released on: 2015-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review One of Men's Journal's Best Books of 2015"The Last Unicorn is a book you simply must read. For one thing Bill deBuys has a real gift for storytelling. And this story, the quest for an animal that was driven to the point of extinction almost as soon as it was "discovered", is a true adventure. Bill's powerful prose leads us deep into the wilderness in an almost unknown part of the world. And it sends out a clarion call bidding us to redouble our efforts to save the last wild places and vanishing animals before it is utterly too late."―Jane Goodall, Ph.D., DBE, Founder, the Jane Goodall Institute & UN Messenger of Peace"Lyrical... An adventure tale and a meditation, an evocative read that makes clear why wild places matter and how difficult it will be to save them."―Emily Anthes, New York Times"Simultaneously an adventure story, a melancholy parable of the challenges of conservation in an increasingly crowded world, and an engaging introduction to the biota of a unique ecosystem... However intractable the human tendency to pillage our environments, deBuys and Robichaud show the strength of an opposite impulse -- to approach nature with wonder, knowledge, and a deep appreciation of beauty. DeBuys paints the disappearing landscapes of his journey with beautiful and evocative prose."―Nick Romeo, Christian Science Monitor"Not only a gorgeous adventure in one of the most remote forests on earth, but also a strategy for hope in an age of mass species extinction.... May this beautifully written book inspire a renewed commitment to the work."―Dean Kuipers, Orion Magazine"The author deftly chronicles both the physical and emotional challenges that come with group travel through an isolated region.... The author's immersive narrative and numerous photos of the unremitting poaching inflicted upon the region's wildlife cause both reader engagement and heartache. A riveting and disturbing account of the clash between the beauty of the wilderness and civilization's unrelenting demands on the natural world."―Kirkus (starred review)"The Last Unicorn celebrates the marvels of the great forest and its wildlife, and William deBuys enlivens its pages with perceptive accounts of local people and cultures. Inspired and entranced by visions of the saola, DeBuys examines what little is known of its enigmatic life as he searches the landscape for glimpses of what we must hope is an enduring future for the natural treasures surviving in these remote mountains."―George Schaller, author of Tibet Wild; VP, Panthera; and senior conservationist, Wildlife Conservation Society"This is a great excuse for an adventure--and having taken the excuse, Bill deBuys delivers. What a wonderful account of a 19th century drama in the 21st century, a story the likes of which we may never read again."―Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home"Conservation journalist deBuys deftly takes the role of a quiet observer while conveying a sense of immersion and intimacy.... With a wilderness-loving voice that is lyrical but never saccharine, deBuys elicits a sense of mystery and beauty befitting the creature itself."―Publishers Weekly"The author dives deeper than any ecological treatise, showing readers the beauty of gibbon chatter and "blown-glass waterfalls" and the sheer emotional toil of losing these things. In the tradition of John McPhee and Wallace Stegner, deBuys offers a profoundly personal, richly atmospheric account of a place that the world would be poorer for losing."―Talea Anderson, Library Journal"It's fortunate that a first-hand account of such a unique voyage exists. That it's written by a storyteller as commanding and reflective as William deBuys, well, that's just plain lucky."―Carson Vaughan, Audubon"It would be an understatement to call a forest, in all its deep complexity, merely beautiful. The same goes for The Last Unicorn. As he tracks a living myth through the jungles of Laos, deBuys' eyes and ears miss nothing, and his poetic grace conveys everything. I haven't read a journey so epic, lyrical, and meaningful since Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard."―Alan Weisman, author of Countdown and The World Without Us"Read The Last Unicorn. The book is extremely important and reads like a novel. DeBuys brings things to life. He writes beautifully. The image of the saola remains alive in the reader's mind. Saola may be the last unicorn."―Evaggelos Vallianatos, The Huffington Post"Like Peter Matthiessen's 1978 The Snow Leopard (Viking), this is less an homage to an iconic species than a meditation on our compulsion to harry and hem in the wild."―Barbara Kiser, Nature"The book will appeal to nonfiction readers who enjoy learning about flora, fauna and people in parts of the world they'll likely never visit. It's comforting to know there are people like Robichaud and writers like deBuys who are committed to sharing their stories. It's even more comforting to know their efforts could result in helping preserve the wildness of this world and the survival of a species."―Rob Merrill, Associated Press"Gripping and stylish.... DeBuys is an evocative writer."―Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post"Imagine Joseph Conrad, Bruce Chatwin, and Paul Theroux writing the most poignant allegory of our time, a quest for the rarest mammal on earth in one of the most hidden places in the world. The newly discovered saola, a zoological will-o'-the-wisp, is being extinguished by poachers before it is known. In a world that grasps for too much, deBuys's austere and tender prose becomes the plaintive voice for the myriad forms of life being monetized and forever extinguished."―Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest"In a world of space satellites, robots, drones and remote controlled cameras, terrestrial ecosystems around the world are yielding their secrets. Large land animals, especially charismatic ones, cannot evade our prying instruments. With humans occupying most of the planet, could there possibly be a large, beautiful land mammal yet to be documented by Science? This book is a stunning scientific thriller, the story of how researchers, tipped off by hints of a fabulous creature, find the remains of a mysterious animal, tracked this elusive mammal into remote, unforgiving wild land to prove its existence. What a read!"―Dr. David Suzuki, author of The Sacred Balance"The Last Unicorn is exhaustively researched, and the trip alone would have made for a riveting read. But it is written with such poetry that it comes as a heart-wrenching wakeup. This book is a beautifully told account of the devastating fact that man alone has relentlessly set about destroying the earth's wildness. It should be required reading for the human race."―Ali MacGraw, actress/activist"A brutal story, told with passion and purpose."―Jane Clayson, WBUR's On Point"DeBuys highlights these larger concerns for conserving ecosystem services around the world artfully by reflecting on his hunt for an almost mythical species. He uses his literary license well."―Steve Rissing, The Columbus Dispatch"An exquisitely written true story about a quest to see a wild saola.... Part travel writing, part adventure, and part conservation, the story is captivating and informative."―The Guardian's GrrlScientist"The book reads like a gripping travelogue, but it also operates at a deeper level, leading us to question how we choose which species to conserve, how growing human populations can fit into a fracturing landscape, and how to value nature in the light of widespread poverty.... Part action adventure, part an exploration of loss, this book is a journey for both the heart and the mind."―David W. Redding, Science
About the Author William deBuys is the author of eight books, including River of Traps, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Pulitzer Prize nonfiction finalist; Enchantment and Exploitation; The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize in 2008); and A Great Aridness. He lives in New Mexico.
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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful. The Path To The Last Unicorn A Book Review By Ira Aip https://medium.com/@re_ari/the-path-to-the-last-unicorn-a-book-review-a52364967878William deBuys has done in a decade what took mankind 10,000 years: left home and discovered the world. DeBuys, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author who calls the mountains of northern New Mexico home, has written three books over this time. In the first, he painstakingly documents a one-hour walk he’s taken regularly for the last 30 years around his property. In the next, he traverses the American Southwest, documenting its fragility under environmental duress. In his latest, published this March by Little, Brown and Company, he travels to Southeast Asia to explore uncharted territory in search of a newly discovered and nearly extinct mammal, the saola.DeBuys considers himself a tracker in the both the physical and metaphysical sense of the term, trying like the Navajo did to unveil what they could “about the mysteries of their day.” When it comes to the footprints of the modern era, deBuys says most of the time they are human-sized.The tracks are the size of an exotic bovid in deBuys’ new book “The Last Unicorn.” Specifically they are Saola-sized, a three-foot-tall antelope-like mammal that has been known to the Western world for a shorter period than MTV. This straight-horned, facially spotted, strangely glanded cousin to cattle and goats was first discovered in 1992 in the hard-to-reach forests that zip together Vietnam and Laos. Since then they have only been seen about as many times as you can count on ten hooves. When viewed in profile, the saola’s horns merge into one, and the animal becomes single-horned, like a unicorn.In “The Last Unicorn,” deBuys and his friend and saola-expert extraordinaire Bill Robichaud take to the dense and, for all intents and purposes unmanaged, mountain woods and slick riverbeds of Lao in a last-ditch effort to see one for themselves. They bring a handful of young and pugnacious guides, preoccupied with depleting rice reserves in order to return home early, and a pack of cameras to set up in auspicious areas. They intend to prove to themselves, and to the broader world, that saola still exist.I first encountered deBuys during my own sojourn across the West, from Austin to San Francisco, in which I was playing journalist as part of a Kickstarter project. I came across his book “A Great Aridness” and it informed not only the direction of my trip, but also the course of my thoughts. Debuys writes with restrained candor, revealing personal details and kernels of truth as irresistible breadcrumbs on treacherous trips into uncertain territory.While death, struggle, and even extinction loom large in these books — while lonesomeness and turmoil underlie their narratives — beauty and hope carry the day.As deBuys told me, “the future is grim, but the sunrise is beautiful.”Each of these books starts and ends at sunrise. In “The Walk,” an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize in 2008, deBuys literally starts and ends at the same place — his ranch-style, self-built house in the remote town of El Valle, nestled among the pinon and ponderosa pine trees of the Sangre De Cristo mountains in Northern New Mexico. He is recently divorced and feeling lost even in this most familiar of places: he walks for solace, he walks for stability, and he walks for company. The words of a strong man enduring a breakable period in his life eventually lead to a realization of “the perfection of disorder and desire.” He says this is the paradise of how it has to be. The seed for his next book is sown: paradise can be lost, and it can be man’s fault.“A Great Aridness” is full of life: too much life, in fact, and not the right kind. The Southwest, the dry and pockmarked region stretching from Southern California to West Texas, is rampant with population growth. It is booming with exploitable natural resources. It is dwindling in water supply. DeBuys ventures into this so-called Cadillac Desert and wrings from it some of the starkest truths of climate change.Once already in the mindset of devastating climate change, it is an easy pivot to the gruesome practice of wildlife poaching and trafficking, as discussed throughout “The Last Unicorn.” The existing wild populations of iconic creatures like rhinoceroses, tigers, and mountain gorillas, linger unstably in the hundreds or maybe thousands as they are poached or simply pushed out of the last vestiges of their territory. As developing countries grow and prosper, their medical superstitions are not dying as quickly as many other esoteric views. Rhino horn, made from the same material as fingernails, is worth tens of thousands of dollars as a cure for cancer. As deBuys states, “in the folk medicine of East Asia, tiger bone is penicillin, interferon, and Viagra rolled into one.”In February, the Obama Administration announced a new national strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking. It includes three priorities: strengthening enforcement, reducing demand, and reinforcing partnerships. It also includes a ban on commercial trade of elephant ivory in the U.S. The world’s largest importer of smuggled tusks, China, also imposed a one-year ban on ivory imports in February. A move to buy time as the country considers next steps to curb demand for the damaging product, domestic ivory trade in China will continue to thrive in the interim.For the saola there is even further indignity in this animalian plight: it is not the target of wildlife poaching, it is merely collateral damage. The saola is not well enough known to be coveted as a remedy, yet is still traverses the same hills and valleys lined with undiscerning snares.During his weeks in the hinterlands, deBuys saw snare lines stretching up to a mile along mountain ridges or down and back up canyons. Any animal passing through the landscape is in great peril of being snared by the sensitive twig-triggers, and being left to die a “slow and cruel” death by hanging upside-down. DeBuys encountered the decaying carcasses of ferret badgers, hog badgers, mongooses, various species of birds, and several critically endangered muntjacs, or barking deer, while searching for saola in the Nakai-Nam Thuen forest of the Annamite Mountains. In a moment of the book that yanks especially hard on the heartstrings, his cohort came across a red-shanked douc, an extremely beautiful and rare monkey, dangling from a snare by its hind foot. He regrets long afterwards not cutting it down and burying it, the image seared into his mind as they push forward deeper into the forest.No stranger to the contradiction of thought required to fight the endless uphill battle of wildlife preservation in the 21st century, deBuys seeks insight from the Quixotic Robichaud as to what keeps him and others like him getting out of their sleeping bags in the morning. He ponders, as he did in various ways in both “The Walk” and “A Great Aridness,” the deeper essence of how humans, when faced with insurmountable odds, combine fatalism with optimism. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald as saying, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”Within the conservation community, he finds the crux of this ability to be beauty. Beauty “moves the heart as reason moves the mind:” “… Put a horse in a meadow, and the meadow becomes animate. Put a saola, even a saola you cannot see, in a forest, and the forest, as though it held a unicorn, acquires an energy that cannot be described. It becomes numinous: it gains the pull of gravity, the weight of water, the float of a feather.”In the end, there is a photograph of a saola, but there are no accompanying words explaining what to make of this. A saola still exists, but it seems as if the world has left it behind. DeBuys remains hopeful that government intervention, NGO actions and cultural shifts can reckon a force powerful enough to swing the pendulum back a ways. I want to believe in deBuys, but I am left with the feeling that he is also a unicorn.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Haunting and Powerful By Jim C DeBuys can really write.In this book, Dubuys captures the frustrations and challenges of modern conservation in remote difficult to reach areas. I found this book to be moving and informative about an amazing forest in the modern shrinking world. Despite the disapointments and change occurring in the forest in remote Laos, the beauty of the forest still can shine though.Thanks to the writer and the naturalist he joins for being able to share their amazing exploration of this remote area.Highly recommended!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. A great read and a real page turner By Daniel Hall Manly Services A great read and a real page turner, I found myself re-living some of my own adventures through this book. Reading about the expedition's obstacles had me laughing out loud at times with a knowing appreciation of traveling through the backcountry of South East Asia. The Last Unicorn inspires me to travel to there once again to see some of the last of the natural world before it is gone.While having a unique voice of his own, DeBuys writes in the spirit of Peter Matthiessen (The Snow Leopard) and David Quammen (Song of the Dodo). I came back to Amazon.com just to order copies for friends and decided to write a review. I assure you, The Last Unicorn is a book well worth reading.
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