The Last Whalers

Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life

By: Doug Bock Clark

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

In this "immersive, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first book [with] the texture and color of a first-rate novel" (New York Times), journalist Doug Bock Clark tells the epic story of the world's last subsistence whalers and the threats posed to a tribe on the brink.

A New York Times Notable Book​
A New York Times Editors' Choice
Winner of Lowell Thomas Travel Book Award Silver Medal
Finalist for William Saroyan International Writing Prize
Longlisted for Mountbatten Award for Best Book
Telegraph Best Travel Books of the Year
Hampshire Gazette Best Books of 2019

One of the favorite books of Yuval Noah Harari, author of the classic best seller Sapiens, "on the subject of humanity's place in the world" (via Airmail).

On a volcanic island in the Savu Sea so remote that other Indonesians call it "The Land Left Behind" live the Lamalerans: a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who are the world's last subsistence whalers. They have survived for half a millennium by hunting whales with bamboo harpoons and handmade wooden boats powered by sails of woven palm fronds. But now, under assault from the rapacious forces of the modern era and a global economy, their way of life teeters on the brink of collapse.

Award-winning journalist Doug Bock Clark, one of a handful of Westerners who speak the Lamaleran language, lived with the tribe across three years, and he brings their world and their people to vivid life in this gripping story of a vanishing culture. Jon, an orphaned apprentice whaler, toils to earn his harpoon and provide for his ailing grandparents, while Ika, his indomitable younger sister, is eager to forge a life unconstrained by tradition, and to realize a star-crossed love. Frans, an aging shaman, tries to unite the tribe in order to undo a deadly curse. And Ignatius, a legendary harpooner entering retirement, labors to hand down the Ways of the Ancestors to his son, Ben, who would secretly rather become a DJ in the distant tourist mecca of Bali.

Deeply empathetic and richly reported, The Last Whalers is a riveting, powerful chronicle of the collision between one of the planet's dwindling indigenous peoples and the irresistible enticements and upheavals of a rapidly transforming world.

©2019 Doug Bock Clark (P)2019 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"A vital, immersive, and elegant debut...With glittering prose and a novelist's knack for storytelling, Clark carries readers to the heart of this community...Reminiscent of Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Clark's book intimately details, with empathy and grace, the tribe's value system and the physical world on which they depend...We often think of indigenous groups as living in remote locations, on the edges of the modern world, but Clark reverses this proposition, using the stories of these whalers to help us understand just what it looks like when the earth reaches carrying capacity and how humans might in turn respond."—Elizabeth Rush, New York Times Book Review

"An immersive and absorbing chronicle that takes the reader deep into the lives of this tribe and is told with a richness of interior detail that renders their lives, and the choices they face, not just comprehensible but somehow familiar...Clark's writing about the ocean and its creatures is superb, so vivid that the reader can feel the sting of salt water up the nose...The magic in this work is Clark's decision to cede the story over to the Lamalerans themselves. In doing so, he captures the drama of the tribe as it attempts to navigate new opportunities that, while enticing, may bring about the extinction of their culture...Whether that culture will, in the end, withstand mounting pressures from the outside remains to be seen. If it doesn't, The Last Whalers will at least document all that has been lost."—Gabriel Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle

"A fascinating debut...Accessible and empathetic...Clark creates a thoughtful look at the precariousness of cultural values and the lure of modernization in the developing world."—Publishers Weekly

Great story

It made me rethink my life!!! To hear about the everyday day life of these men and women made me realize how blessed i am as an American nd how easy we have! beautiful writing!

Super interesting look at an indigenous tribe

In the modern world, it is hard to imagine the way of life of different indigenous people so much different than our own in western civilization. This was an interesting look and forced me to consider the negative impacts of the modern ways of life.

Good book on hunter-gatherer tribe in Indonesia

Would rate it highly, alongside "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes", and "Death in the Rainforest", as a thoughtful account of one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes remaining today. Only niggle is that the narrator completely butchers the few words and paragraphs of Lamaleran/ Indonesian language text pronunciation. It's so bad that it's incomprehensible to a speaker of Bahasa Indonesia; wouldn't have taken much effort to improve on that.

The Leviathan

The book opens with a quote from Hobbs’s Leviathan, the last chapter closes with a leviathan of another type. In that closing chapter the circle is closed, the philosophical treatise of Hobbs is viewed in a way I hadn’t considered before. “What it may be like for those on the periphery when the State entices “us” to their social contract”.
I’ll be mulling over the underlying questions for some time.
Thanks for your time.