The notion that fluid motion often organizes itself into coherent structures has increasingly permeated modern fluid dynamics. Such localized objects appear in laminar flows and persist in turbulent states; from the water on windows on rainy days, to the circulations in planetary atmospheres. This review concerns solitary waves in fluids. More specifically, it centres around the mathematical description of solitary waves in a single spatial dimension. Moreover, it concentrates on strongly dissipative dynamics, rather than integrable systems like the KdV equation. One-dimensional solitary waves, or pulses and fronts as they are also called, are the simplest kinds of coherent structure (at least from a geometrical point of view). Nevertheless, their dynamics can be rich and complicated. In some circumstances this leads to the formation of spatio-temporal chaos in the systems giving birth to the solitary waves, and understanding that phenomenon is one of the major goals in the theory outlined in this review. Unfortunately, such a goal is far from achieved to date, and the author assess its current status and incompleteness.