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Summary: Fascinating look at a world I never knew existed.
Review: I don't know an orchid from a dandelion, but something about this book's description intrigued me. The pursuit of beauty takes many forms, and orchids appear to be a particularly virulent strain of this passion, which for some, apparently, borders on madness.The author draws readers into the intertwined worlds of orchid business and orchid obsession in South Florida, where history and heat inject their own craziness into the mix. It is a fascinating glimpse into the human condition; I will never pass another flower store advertising orchids without pausing to think about this book. In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I immediately went out and bought Eric Hansen's "Orchid Fever" -- perhaps the beginning of my own orchid obsession!
Rating: 
Summary: A minority opinion...I enjoyed this book
Review: I received this book 3rd hand (my apologies to the author)after the first two mature readers put it down after the first chapter. Based on the most recent reviews posted here, my friends were not alone in their disappointment. Perhaps out of selfish pride that I could read a book others found difficult, I persevered,even through some of the slower portions, reaching for the web of morals that inspired Ms. Orlean to write to such detail and span so many aspects of her topic. I believe that the nugget of value to be extracted has two faces, both reveal (perhaps subconciously) her own personal traits. First, beyond the specific object of our obsessions, our interests are more personal and individual than shared. We are often driven by varyious substitution or deferred gratifications rather than a need to socialize. Thus, in the orchid arena, great conflicts arise over rights to judge in contests, theft is rampant, folks travel great distances and suffer severe discomfort to just see a specific orchid in bloom,etc. Thanks to the author's rigorous research and reporting, we're presented with a perspective over time and geography supporting more dissimilarities in personalities and motivations than congruences. Furthermore, with LaRoche as the primary example, the Orchid(and plantlife in general) is only the current placebo for the yearning, not the medication. The second message implied is that despite her denial in the postlog comments (in the paperback version), Orchids are about sex. She claimed to be focusing on the relationship between the collectors and the flower but it is a (thin) metaphor for personal relationships, deep physical relations, of which she carefully skirted away. One comes away wondering, what is her personal life really like? It must be wanting. Thus, I rate this better than most other readers for the cerebral exercise and conceptual reward for perseverence.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting protagonist, fascinating topic, clumsy presentat
Review: The work of a journalist not a writer. Disjointed, with some very interesting snippets but no thematic coherence and clumsy phrasing. A very bad book.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing.
Review: The Orchid Thief is not a tale of any kind -- horticulture, lust, or lunacy. There is no story, no plot, no nothing. The horticultural content is riddled with inaccurate generalities and hearsay making it an annoying read at best. While well-written natural history tales are exciting, interesting, and educational, Ms. Orleans merely relays a stream of gossip meant to shock us. If you are really interested in the natural history of Florida or the Orchid family, you will have to look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Only for the extremely curious
Review: Can't figure out why this got such rave reviews. Based on those raves, I expected a book highlighting the motivations behind, and the experience of, obsession. Instead the book reads as a litany of botanical trivia and unintersting personal details about the author. I put the book down with only fifty pages to go...something I've almost never done.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I was expecting
Review: I thought I was buying a romance novel of some sort based on the name and a brief description. Unfortunatly, I ended up with a story about this crazy loser and his plant hobby. For the sake of Orlean, she makes this dull subject into an interesting documentary on orchids and many of their biological traits.
Rating: 
Summary: A not so notable book
Review: The concept of the book is good, but the execution is poor. The writing was choppy with grammatical errors, and the book needs more editing. The author inserts herself oddly into the story commenting on her inability to buy diet Cokes or on where she got her swamp sneakers, tidbits of information that were certainly not the reason I bought the book. I am an amateur orchid raiser and even I found inaccuracies in some of the information on orchids. What mystifies me is how this book got as many rave reviews.
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Summary: Orchid Madness
Review: Yesterday I finished "The Orchid Thief." It was a wonderful read. I love that New Yorker style of just opening the trunk and letting the words pour out, like so much fresh pebbly concrete filling a new roadway of thought. Orlean is a clever writer, and she has more or less made a whole cloth out of a bunch of disparate unmattched pieces of old sheets, a literary quilt of remarkable symmetry considering her subjects and her point of view. I was not disappointed with the ending, as was a friend, because, let's face it, where else could the thing go? Larouche would not change, would continue a directionless enigma, and finding the Ghost Orchid would have weakened the ambient frustration of the work. I think I am perhaps a strange reader in some ways. I like this eclectic fabricating of a tale out of pieces that the non-creative mind might find disjointed, but, which, in developing a gestalt, all fall somehow magically into place. And, of course, it helps that I know virtually nothing about Florida and even less about orchids. Orlean's contrasts of the various shades of Florida ecology and sociology, mixed with the history of orchid mania (orchidomania for the Victorians, as I recall) made a powerful and nearly epic sweep of territory I was previously completely unfamiliar with, and she made the territory meaningful and important. I feel a whole new understanding of both Florida (a part of americana I have never really seen as anything more than a great retirement shed for the supernumerary members of our otherwise active culture), the importance of flora in not only the ecology but the economy of this amorphous state, and the epochal and historical forces driving the current landscape of sprawl, swamp, scheme, schlep, swindle, storm, scam, and survival, all within a context of ancient geology, enormous wealth (or wishes for wealth), improbable characters confronting improbable odds for the sake of greed driven by addiction to outrageous beauty and the drive for death defying adventure, all while the sleepy world of the suburb sits idly by, minding its own business and totally senseless to the great dramas playing themselves out within the morass of the undergrowth which harbors orchid, adventurer, horticultural maverik, and the whole host of necessary accompanying props and backdrops. It was a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: An engaging PEEK...
Review: First, a few caveats (it's always best to be up-front about ones biases and assumptions): 1) I haven't read Ms. Orlean's 'New Yorker' article, so I have no basis of comparison between it and this book. 2) I have never lived in South Florida, and have only visited Miami Beach twice, so my ability to say what is "true" about Florida's history and culture is somewhat limited and I won't even bother to attempt to verify any of Ms. Orlean's assertions. Fact - or slightly modified fact - I don't know... That being said, this book is a very enjoyable, engaging read. No, it does not have a particularly suspenseful or intriguing STORYline, especially if what you're looking for is an amazing-but-true mystery with high drama and a surprise ending. The author says, from the beginning, that she can only deal in the facts of the case - if she wants to keep this a non-fiction book, she's limited by real events. What she does, very successfully, however, is reveal the fascinating world of obsession and collecting - in this case, for a particular form of plant. And she does this with amazing ease and grace. Like her guides in the swamps, Ms. Orlean takes us through lessons in history, evolution, geology and botany - subjects which could be incredibly dry in someone else's hands - and connects them neatly with her incredible descriptions of current orchid mania - the characters, the controversies, and the competition. Her ability to make those connections allows the reader to take a step further, and make their own, outside of what she has written. I constantly found myself saying, "Oh my, that's the (explorer/patron/flower) that (did this/went there/made that)." Personally, I love that - the making of connections, between what the author shows and the reader already knows. That's when you get grabbed by what you're reading. And, again, the author's style is very engaging. Sure, she may repeat a fact once in a while, but that's only to reinforce the information she's given you about a set of fairly complex subjects - at least for the average reader (me). She takes you through her history lessons and personal experiences with arch wit and subtle humor (quote - somewhat bastardized: "I hate being in a swamp with machete-wielding convicts.") Some prefer anonymous journalism; Ms. Orlean injects her own experiences and thoughts into the story with a complete rejection of false objectivity; she's there, she's experiencing this, and the story is as much about her own voyage as anyone else's. Bottom-line? A very enjoyable book. Take it for what it is - I don't think the author has served it to us with any pretenses, so we shouldn't take it that way.
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Summary: I know the swamp, and this book is fiction, not journalism.
Review: As someone who has worked for almost forty years with others who have fought to save south Florida's western Everglades,I looked forward to this book. But Orlean simply doesn't get it. Her cartoon characterization of the Seminole people is worse than inaccurate, it is old-fashioned stereotyping at its worst. The author paid so little real attention to the swamp she claims to have struggled through that she doesn't even know where it is -- her description, 25 miles south of Naples, would place that ancient cypress forest squarely in the Gulf of Mexico. Orlean's historical research is more than sloppy: how could anyone take an old Spanish account of lobsters in Florida's coastal waters and then write that these salt-water creatures were native to an inland fresh-water forest? Her discussion of more recent events is just as off base: Orlean's story of a would-be developer threatening violence against those who saved the Fakahatchee is actually (she correctly names the promoter's organization) about a man who threatened to kill me in a dispute over land no where near the Fakahatchee, in what is now the Big Cypress National Preserve. And the author doesn't even write accurately about Florida orchids (the Ghost orchid, for example is not as she claims found only in the Fakahatchee), much less the collectors who are obsessed by them. Orlean has skimmed very lightly through south Florida's rich cultural and natural history, and tossed what intrigued her into the Fakahatchee, a place that no reader will know much about after having read this book. Carl Hiassen's fiction is more accurate about people, places and events in south Florida than is this frothy and misleading book.
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