The Orchid Thief

Rating:
Summary: quite good
Review: Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. -Susan Orlean

There has almost certainly never been a more off-putting piece of media than the venerable magazine The New Yorker--it's dense columns of prose marching along in glossy black and white, page after page... But then you pick up a book by a John McPhee (see reviews above), a Roger Angell, a Joseph Mitchell, a Berton Roueche or a David Remnick and you realize what extraordinary pieces of journalism appear first in it's pages. Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief is the latest example. A general contributor to the magazine, she describes her style thus:

I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story, I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.

Well, as it turns out, this story is equal to her beautiful metaphor.

In 1994, John Laroche, the "orchid thief" and three Seminole Indian men, were caught leaving a Florida Wildlife Preserve with bags full of Ghost orchid (Polyrrhiza lindenii) specimens. They challenged the arrest on the basis of a law allowing Native tribes to violate the endangered species act and some other rigmarole. Orleans went to Florida to get the story, befriended the weirdly charismatic Laroche and gained entry to the bizarre world of orchid collectors. As the story unfolds, she presents a detailed portrait of Laroche and dutifully reports on the court case, but she also offers a thorough natural history of orchids, with fascinating digressions on Florida itself, the Seminole Indians, etc., and of man's obsession with these remarkable plants. The incredible lengths that collectors, and the hunters they employ, have gone to in order to find rare orchids makes for an original read. But ultimately, the book becomes a kind of obsession with obsession:

I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire.

One is inevitably reminded of Rex Stout's great eccentric detective Nero Wolfe (see Orrin's review of Fer-de-Lance: A Nero Wolfe Mystery), whose very oddity was symbolized by his obsession with orchids. Orlean writes of her own efforts to avoid this fate, refusing to keep any of the plants that people pressed upon her, but the book ends with her tramping through a godforsaken swamp in search of a glimpse of the Ghost orchid that started the whole case. In the end, even she has been consumed by this passion for a flower.

Now when I was a kid I experienced an epiphany thanks to a bag of rock salt. Bags of Hailite used to show a polar bear carrying a bag of Hailite with the salt spilling out onto ice and, of course, the bag the bear was carrying repeated the same picture and so on and so on... For the first time it struck me that this was an infinite series--the picture of the bear would continue ad infinitum. Which brings us back to Susan Orlean. If you set out to write about obsessive orchid collectors and become obsessed with them in turn, are you writing about obsession or demonstrating it? Will someone come out with a book about authors who become obsessed with their topics?

This is a terrific book, Orlean wisely intersperses her reportage on the mercurial Laroche with the meatier segments on orchids, orchid hunters and other topics and she keeps the book short enough that we're done before our attention flags. If she fails to determine exactly what causes her subjects to become obsessed with orchids and never reckons with her own fascination with them, these are forgivable flaws. In the future, I'll look for her work in The New Yorker.

GRADE: A-

Rating:
Summary: Interesting...
Review: Susan Orlean is an amazing writer; she has taken a subject for which she has professed no interest, (she gave orchids away to avoid their ultimate never-ending appeal!) and yet she has managed to write a gripping account of her time spent persuing the accounts of an orchid-thief/lunatic/self-proclaimed genius.

I quickly read through this well written book through 2 flu-ridden afternoons. Susan's swamp predicaments, ability to make a magazine-style story enfold into an entire book, and dead-pan humor, made me follow through to the end. I couldn't help but relate to the tales of Orchid afficianados: as I was reading, I was snatching glimpses at my own multiple rows of double, triple and quadruple leafed but currently flowerless white phaleonopsis.

I am looking forward to a novel from this writer - she is truly talented!

Rating:
Summary: Riveting book. Almost 5 starts. Beautifully told.
Review: Orchids and characters, both beautiful and rare. They would make a good read even if they were fiction--but they are real. Real and exotic and beautiful.

Rating:
Summary: Exotic Plants and People
Review: Susan Orlean has written an astonishing non-fiction work that has it all: An enjoyable and entertaining narrator, our author; an idiosyncratic anti-hero - John Laroche; an unfathomable body of craft and knowledge - orchid gathering, cloning and propagation; a sultry setting - the Fakahatchee Swamp in Florida; a strapping supporting cast - Florida's Seminole Indians; and finally the foolish, outrageous world of orchid enthusiasts.

Susan reveals to us that the combination of: orchids, plant cloning, Seminole Indians, endangered plant species, an eccentric Orchid Thief and a crime of theft in a Florida swamp were irresistible subjects for a story. You will find her book compelling too! I read it through twice, not wanting to lose contact with these exotic characters.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging read
Review: I was completely absorbed by this book. Much of it had to do with Susan Orlean's wonderful writing style. It seems Ms. Orlean could take any subject and make it engaging. The characterizations were wonderful and I learned a great deal about the state of Florida and the Seminoles, as well as the whole crazy world of orchids. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Good for a documentary
Review: Well, I must admit, Susan Orlean is a very good writer. The Orchid Theif, however, is not the best book if you're looking for some high quality prose. Its basically a long magazine article, but hey- if you're interested in orchids and the Southern Florida Orchid Community, that might not be a problem. Its not exactly captivating, but worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Amateur Orchid growers will learn a lot...
Review: IF, they don't yawn themselves to sleep before finishing this. I learned a lot about orchids (whether I wanted to or not) and wish I had read the reviews before purchasing it! It seems some of the info in the book was a little off, and annoyingly so! My hubby, (aware of my penchant for growing things; since I killed my last two sweet darling orchids, and I have a love of reading) thought this was the perfect book for me... Unfortunately, once started, I must finish... but this was tough. READ THE REVIEWS FIRST. They're generally pretty close.

Rating:
Summary: wondeful characters, good description conquered by boring...
Review: This book has to be one of the best described books i've ever read. What makes the description even better is the characters, so greatly defined you could mistake them for your best friend. However, there is a little problem...boredom. This book is extremely boring and difficult to get through at parts, this will make you skip pages of the book and eventually skip to the end, where you will say 'i could have wrote that in two pages, easy';. Then you will realize you actually only read two pages. I loved the beginning of the book, i really did, but by the time it got to the end i was so bored i fell asleep and barely remembered any of it. I give Susan Orlean an around of applause for taking a challenge like this, i give Susan Orlean a stick of dynamite and tell her to stick it in her head to clear it for taking on a challenge like this. NO author could save this book from the enemy of boredom. My grade: B-

Rating:
Summary: Up Close and Too Personal
Review: As a former New Yorker and now a Florida resident for seven years, I am always eager to see fresh material on this state, its history and environment. From that standpoint, this is a book that will hold your interest although there is too much "me" in the book. However, from my limited knowledge, I spotted several inaccuracies that diminish the author's credibility as a careful researcher. She describes the Tamiami Trail as starting in Ft. Myers (which she spells incorrectly as Ft. Meyers). The reason it's called the Tamiami Trail is that it spans the route from Tampa to Miami. My horticultural knowledge is mostly confined to what I see in the Home Depot garden center but I know how to spell liriope, a common border plant here (she spells it loriope). It makes me wonder about how far to trust her other horticultural pronouncements.

Rating:
Summary: Great stuff!
Review: Subtitled, a "True Story of Beauty and Obsession", The Orchid Thief first came to me in the form of a fascinating "New Yorker" article. Orlean, hooked by a small article in the paper about the theft of some valuable orchids from a Florida greenhouse, travels to Florida and begins the journalistic search for the whole story. Her protagonist is a weird bird named John Laroche who is part-time con artist, part-time 'collector', part-time orchid grower, and full-time nutcase. While Orlean does a fine job of detailing the events of the orchid 'burglery', what is even more fascinating is her take on the entire history of orchid-collecting and growing, of the wild ecology of Florida's Fakahatchee everglade and of a certain amount of history about the Seminole Indians. Like so many of Elmore Leonard's or John D. MacDonald's characters, Florida is rife with con-men, but to see them involved in cons not involving drugs, money, or gold, was a wonderful twist. For someone who generally enjoys a well-written novel, I was captivated by this tale. I agree with whoever said, fact IS weirder than fiction - you can't make stuff like this up!