Can Yi-Fu Tuan, one of the world''s most decorated geographers, from the aspen glow of retirement and a distinguished career, hold the interest of young readers who themselves are just now embarking on their own sojourns into the larger world? The question is all the more important for Professor Tuan, because the topic of his last book, his ''last launch,'' is human life itself---what it means to be human and how we humans can reach our full potential in the brief period we live on Earth. Professor Tuan, like the curious child on a familiar beach, has decided to make his last launch a personal voyage in which he sends messages to the young in a bottle presented as a book. Securely corked, the bottle is cast into the vast sea before finding its resting ground in the hands of a young reader, who discovers the bottle on a foreign shore. Contained within the bottle are sixteen messages never before published. They represent Professor Tuan''s last conversation, his last meal, with his readers, young and old. The messages that Professor Tuan has presented involve his final thoughts about childhood and education, about comprehending the relationship between space, place, and time, about understanding social reality and our attitudes toward nature and religion. But, ultimately, The Last Launch is about goodness and the Good, a recurrent theme in the master scholar''s work. Although we humans, by nature, are flawed beings, Professor Tuan affirms that we are also the most subtly complex beings in the solar system, if not in the Milky Way.

All of us are endowed with keen senses and some with even keener minds that enable us to savor the wonders of this world that is our only home. Moreover, we humans are, by nature, moral beings who find fulfillment and happiness in doing good. Since evil--as the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing--does not disdain from inflicting the slightest hurt or harm, we must not miss any opportunity to do good, Professor Tuan urges, however inconsequential the doing may seem at the time. In a final reflection, Professor Tuan offers the following: that, in living a life fully, one senses that we are engaged in something larger than ourselves, that we may well be in a cosmic struggle for life in which there is no trifling player among us. Everyone and everything on Earth counts. Thus, doing good in one''s life is the ultimate form of human love and caring. If we do not embrace this truth, is it because we fear the responsibility and accountability of doing good? Such are the questions to be found in Professor Tuan''s bottle, to be answered in his last launch. Lucky is the person forever young in spirit who picks up the bottle on the beach and reads and listens to its contents.

Excerpt: "I was in Panama in 1959 studying the coastline. I needed to go to a sandbar separated from the mainland by a stretch of mangrove swamp. I waited for the tide to withdraw, so I could walk across. Hours later, having completed my survey of the sandbar, I packed my notebooks, camera, and compass for the return trip. To my surprise, I was confronted by an unfamiliar landscape. A rising tide had covered the swamp in one-to-two feet of water, and I would have to wade through the water and mud to get back to solid land. As I reluctantly prepared myself to take on the tide, a young fisherman approached, pushing an old bike. On its handlebar was a row of fish, which he no doubt intended to sell on the mainland.

He spoke a language I didn''t understand. His gestures, however, made it clear that he wanted me to sit on his bike so that he could push me through the swamp. He had to push hard. I could see his strained muscles and smell his sweat. As soon as we reached dry land, I got off the bike and dug into my wallet for a few dollars to give him. I looked through the sheaf of bills to find the right amount. When I turned around, he was nowhere to be seen. I have never forgotten his kindness.

He was doing good." -- Yi-Fu Tuan , from the chapter "Encounters with Goodness".