Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly entertaining, fun and inspiring book
Review: After reading Susan Orlean's excellent The Orchid Thief last year and having followed some of her recent writing in The New Yorker (particularly a fantastic piece on the hapless New Hampshire girl-rock group from the 1970's, The Shaggs), I was eagerly awaiting this collection of profiles. It not only surpassed my very high expectations for literary quality, it is one of the funniest and most entertaining, lively and moving books I have read in quite awhile. She gets these people down perfectly and is a master of the revealing touch. The opening chapter on a typical 10-year-old American boy is my favorite -- it allows the reader to enter a kid's world very much from his point of view while overlaying a beautifully reported and crafted commentary that manages all at once to be empathetic, witty,ironic and highly informative. The ending of this piece, like the ending to both the introduction and the title piece on the first female matador in Spain which concludes the book, is hauntingly poignant and gets to what Orlean is really about here: showing the extraordinarily captivating nature of what seemingly ordinary people are really like when closely examined in their own subcultures. The intelligence and insight she brings to bear in joyfully sharing with the reader what she has discovered is what makes this book so wonderful.
Rating: 
Summary: booooooring!
Review: Another book about Susan Orlean, by Susan Orlean ... yes, she can write, but only when the topic reflects back onto her somehow. Part of John McPhee's artistry was a total lack of self-absorbtion; Orlean suffers from the opposite problem. And unfortunately for us, her life is just plain not interesting enough. And is that her on the cover? UGH.
Rating:
Summary: What Happened to Our Susan Orlean?
Review: Before Susan Orlean became self-obsessed, she was a journalist who was posed to inherit the literary tradition of Didion, McPhee, Capote, Wolfe, etc. But something's happened. With the fluke popularity of the Orhard Thief--a very uneven book, one of those extended New Yorker articles that shuld have been left as is because it now reads as merely a struggle to fill up space--she's turned herself into a New York, high powered, high profile "celebrity" writer who seems to have lost touch with the small, quiet reporter who was fascinated first and foremost with her subjects...not herself. This book is a disappointment. How telling of her new attitude toward her subjects that on the cover of a book about OTHER people ("Encounters with Extraordinary People") she's posed seductively and made-up to the hilt. This is a shame of a book. I once adored this writer's older work.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: For anyone who enjoys reading profile pieces in major national magazines, you will love Orlean's superb writing! Her choices of interview subjects are far and varied, from the American Man, Aged 10 to the Female Bullfighter, hence the title of the book.
You will be delighted and most of all, impressed by her deft writing and wonderfully descriptive passages. You will not be disappointed!
Rating: 
Summary: OK, Not Great
Review: I began this book, a collection of essays about people Orlean had interviewed, with enthusiasm, but finished it with relief. The essays were well-written, but soon began to seem too much alike to be of great interest. I ended up skipping some that were not about subjects I found intrinsically interesting.Several of the essays date from the 1980s, and read as though they did. For example, the author's observations regarding 1980s pop singer Tiffany seemed dated, in light of the current slick marketing of teen stars (or acts aimed at the teen market). It would have been worth making some effort to update the stories, and place them in some kind of context. Instead, this is just a collection of previously published pieces, not all of which should have been brought back to light.
Rating:
Summary: OK, Not Great
Review: I began this book, a collection of essays about people Orlean had interviewed, with enthusiasm, but finished it with relief. The essays were well-written, but soon began to seem too much alike to be of great interest. I ended up skipping some that were not about subjects I found intrinsically interesting. Several of the essays date from the 1980s, and read as though they did. For example, the author's observations regarding 1980s pop singer Tiffany seemed dated, in light of the current slick marketing of teen stars (or acts aimed at the teen market). It would have been worth making some effort to update the stories, and place them in some kind of context. Instead, this is just a collection of previously published pieces, not all of which should have been brought back to light.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover
Review: I bought this book because I -- unlike the mean spirited reviewer from San Francisco -- love the way the author looks on the cover, OK? I've read Orlean's other books and her prose is beautiful, refined and deeply formatted. And, as the cover photo indicates, so is her sense of fun and adventure. She's my kind of writer: A woman with a sharp and openhanded sensibility.
Rating:
Summary: Nobody Does It Better!
Review: Like "Saturday Night" and "The Orchid Thief", "The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup" proves that Susan Orlean may very well be the best nonfiction writer alive today.
Rating:
Summary: Non-fiction at its finest
Review: Like her predecessor Joan Didion, Susan Orlean writes of the wide range of human experience--from a traveling gospel group in the South to a budding basketball star--and in doing so presents a portrait of America that is both comprehensive and engaging. What's even better is that she does it without ever being sentimental. While I liked all of the essays in this volume, my favorites were ones that showed lives of the "average" American, like Heather Heaton, a young journalist covering the events of a small town, and, of course, "The American Male, age 10." Ms. Orlean has a way of following her subjects around & illuminating their lives, without ever getting in the way. Truly professional work, and I only have to say: give us more!
Rating: 
Summary: vastly overrated
Review: Look at the cover of this book and you'll see who and what it's really about. It's all about SO; her subject matter is irrelevant both to her and, consequently, to the reader. Worse, even her style, which seems to sucker in a lot of poeple, is not exactly her own. If you want to read what she's read, and cribbed from, track down a copy of Mr. Personality, by Mark Singer, also a New Yorker writer but a far finer one. Really, I don't see how SO can pass MS in the NYer's hallways and not hide her head in shame. Singer is by far the more human writer. He reserves his style for his short Talk of the Town pieces, drifting it to the side for his longer, more important pices. Unlike SO, he knows when to take it down a notch in order to add some real heart and feeling to his writing. SO's stuff, from one story to the next, is stylistically the same beginning to end. Half.com often has copies of Singer's book. When you find it, be sure to check out what's on the cover; it ain't a picture of Singer.
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