Read by Jay Snyder

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 bestseller 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. Doug Bock Clark is a writer whose articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, National Geographic, GQ, Wired, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Clark also won the 2017 Reporting Award, was a finalist for the 2016 Mirror Award, and has been awarded two Fulbright Fellowships, a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and an 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship. He has been interviewed about his work on CNN, BBC, NPR, and ABC's 20/20. He is a Visiting Scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. "A vital, immersive, and elegant glittering prose and a novelist's knack for storytelling, Clark carries readers to the heart of this 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 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, densely reported, and altogether remarkable first story has the texture and coloring of a first-rate 's writing is supple but closely tracks the lives of many Lamalerans, male and female, young and old, and he weaves their stories together with a history of the tribe and its beliefs. He manages to make this tribe's dilemmas universal -- no small brings empath

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