The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession

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Summary: Flower powered.
Review: I was inspired to read Susan Orlean's "true story of beauty and obsession" after seeing the movie "Adaptation" twice in one week. THE ORCHID THIEF is a fascinating love story: "When a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine . . . it's a sort of madness" (p. 78). And Orlean's book is as much about exotic orchids as the eccentric characters who collect them.

THE ORCHID THIEF evolved out of a article Orleans first published in "The New Yorker" magazine about John Laroche's 1994 trial for removing endangered orchids from Florida's Fakahatchee swamp. Thirty-six-year-old Laroche is a tall, skinny guy, "with the posture of al dente spaghetti," Orleans writes, "and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth" (p. 4). Laroche's life has been a series of obsessions, from Ice Age fossils, turtles, and old mirrors, to orchids. In writing about Laroche's criminal lust for orchids, Orleans ultimately discovers her own "unembarrassing passion--I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately" (p. 41). Laroche's oddball obsessions offer Orleans a meaningful lesson in "getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become a part of your life" (p. 279).

With its lessons in living a passionate life, exotic flowers, quirky characters, muddy swamps filled with snapping turtles, rattlesnakes, bugs and critters--who could ask for anything more from a book?

G. Merritt

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Summary: Passion for orchids. And the writer's passion for the story
Review: I love to learn new things. That's why this 1998 book by journalist Susan Orlean appealed to me. It's about orchids. And one particular eccentric man with a scheme to grow rich from Florida's endangered Ghost Orchid. But mostly, it's about the passion surrounding the special world of the orchid lover. And, also, it's about the writer's own passion for a good story.

On a visit to Florida, Ms. Orleans just happened to see a small article in the local newspaper about John Laroche, accused of stealing orchids from the Fakahatchee Swamp. On a whim, she went to the trial, became interested in the subject and, with a sense of humor and a great way with words, she takes the reader on her own journey of discovery. I love Ms. Orleans' writing. For example, she describes John Laroche as having "the posture of al dente spaghetti" and "the bulk and shape of a coat hanger".

I identified with the writer's experience completely. I was right with her as she explored the hot mucky swamps. And I listened with her ears as she interviewed collectors, business people and law enforcement agents. I learned about the Seminole Indians and their own particular story. I learned a lot of orchid history dating back hundreds of years which included a whole cast of European plunderers, smugglers and naturalists. And I learned about Florida, with all its beauty and land grabbing and swamps and personalities. A lot of research went into this book. It's full of facts and figures as well as the writer's personal observations. It certainly taught me a lot. It even drove me to the Internet to find out when the next orchid show will be in New York. I know I'll be there.

I loved this book and give it an extremely high recommendation. It certainly opened a whole new world for me.

Rating:
Summary: Annoying Audio
Review: I cannot get through this book. The reader's voice is annoying and it turns out to be not a story of a person but a travalogue mainly of Florida.

I learned a lot more about orchids than I care to know. To me it was like a textbook and the so-called orchid thief barely appeared. I had expected a novel and instead was back in the BOTANY department where I used to work.

Maybe if I had read it with my eyes I would have liked it but the audio WAS not pleasant and I don't think I'll get past the 4th disc.

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Summary: ORCHIDS GET NAME & FAME, BUT MYSTERY IS THE GAME
Review: Talking about mystery! It was happenstance that I even heard of this book. But I'm not one to knock coincidence; sometimes it points you to great profundity and pleasure.

You get more than you bargained for here. A good read, yes. New Yorker magazine staffer Susan Orlean writes deceptively well, couching her easygoing style in these thick, densely detailed paragraphs, like information sandwiches from some fabulous journalistic deli. She weaves a fascinating and intricate narrative, a revelation of different worlds, people, possibilities-I picked it up on a whim, next thing I knew, I was hooked.

THE ORCHID THIEF begins with Orlean's regard of an odd, off-the-wall little item about a botched caper. Before long it's about mystery. Not the simple idea of a mystery, like in a detective novel (although that Sam Spade remark in the movie version of "The Maltese Falcon," about crooks chasing "the stuff that dreams are made of" wouldn't be off the mark). At center it's about something more elusive: the mystery of life, or maybe the mystery in life.

At the heart of this mystery lie orchids - "a jewel of a flower on a haystack of a plant" - so evolved and diversified they've become "the biggest flowering plant family on earth because each orchid species has made itself irresistible." Orchids are "ancient, intricate living things that have adapted to every environment on earth." Tens of thousands of varieties, and more being created by natural as well as man-made hybridization virtually every day. The more you learn about orchids, the more you wonder (to borrow from novelist Tom Robbins' remark about how water invented man to transport itself from one place to another), is it just possible orchids invented insect and human life to propagate themselves?

Spawning the mystery is the passion of the orchid collector. (Orlean says, "It was religion. I wanted to want something as much as people wanted these plants, but it isn't part of my constitution.") Orlean wonders to a sympathetic park ranger why orchids seduce people. "Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose," he tells her. "Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help them pass the time."

Orlean tries hard to remain dispassionate but it's all just too weird.

Take the title character, John Laroche, who's "a character" indeed. This wiry, intense, gap-toothed, self-taught and self-confident chain-smoker, busted for blatantly violating a slew of wildlife protection laws (leading a crew of Seminoles to abscond sacks of wild orchids from state wetlands), grins at his pretrial hearing while he tells the judge, "Frankly, Your Honor, I'm probably the smartest person I know." Is this guy for real? Well, yes. That's part of the charm, that Laroche and the assorted collection of "everyday people" Orlean encounters - growers, collectors, smugglers, park rangers and phobic convicts, Seminole chiefs and entrepreneurs - all could have emerged from Central Casting for an Elmore Leonard novel.

The perfect setting for all this mystery is that peninsular strangeness known as the state of Florida ("less like a state than a sponge") "the last part of the continental United States to have emerged from the ocean." This "last frontier," this surreal theme park, attracts and nurtures - sometimes to be found nowhere else - a dizzying profusion of plant and animal life, not to mention human dreamers and schemers. Orlean surmises that's its history and seems to be its reason for being.

This book was an unexpected pleasure. Thanks to Orlean's wide-eyed interest and exhaustive fact-gathering, seasoned by her considerable narrative skill, I was thoroughly enchanted. Soon as I finished it, I wanted "seconds": to read it again and make sure I hadn't missed anything; and, to see more on orchids and find out what the fever was about. [And that, by the way, is how I discovered Eric Hansen's book, ORCHID FEVER, another fine read that I've also reviewed, which complements this one very nicely.] I don't know that I'd want to become an orchid freak - frankly, like Orlean, all that passion and devotion kind of scares me, too - however, thanks to her efforts, at least I can understand it. And I have a new appreciation for "the sweet mystery of life".

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-

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Summary: The Ghost Orchid Comes Alive!
Review: Susan Orlean joins orchid collector and obsessor John Laroche, to find the amazing and rare, ghost orchid. Overtime she herself falls also in love with orchids. The book focuses not only on orchids but mainly on the Fakahatchee reserve where the ghost orchids are.If you have only heard of orchids or own one yourself or are just interested in the marvels of Florida and the Fakahatchee, then you should also fall into the wonderful rabbit hole of the Orchid Thief!

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Summary: An original, quirky and entertaining book.
Review: Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" is an intriguing look at people who are obsessed with collecting orchids. Originally, Ms. Orlean's main focus was to write a profile of John Laroche in "The New Yorker" magazine. Laroche is an offbeat character who spent a great deal of time and money amassing a huge orchid collection. When Laroche banded together with a group of Seminole Indians to steal orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand, a 63,000-acre preserve in southwest Florida, he was arrested and tried for his crime.

Orlean eventually expanded her article on Laroche into this book. She widened the scope of her research and came up with many interesting tidbits about orchids and those who collect them. For example, I learned that orchids often outlive human beings. In fact, orchids can theoretically live forever, since they have no natural enemies. Some orchid owners designate a person as an "orchid heir" in their wills, since the owners expect that their precious orchids will outlive them.

Orlean has a delicious sense of wonder, a beautiful and lyrical writing style, and an eye for fascinating details. She has the ability to place the reader in the middle of a swamp, at an orchid show, or on an expedition into the wilds of South America. Not only does Orlean provide the reader with little known facts about orchids, but she also explores some of the oddities of human nature. What causes people to become so passionate about collecting orchids that they risk their fortunes or even their lives to acquire rare species of this coveted plant? When does a passion for collecting orchids become an unhealthy obsession?

If you are tired of reading formulaic novels, you may want to join Susan Orlean on her exciting and memorable journey into the world of orchid collecting. You do not have to be a plant lover, a gardener or a botanist to enjoy "The Orchid Thief."

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Summary: Passion turned obsession
Review: I first saw the movie 'Adaptation': a film adaptation of the book 'The Orchid Thief.' The movie became, before the end, myopic in that hollwood-filming-itself way that only large budget films with too many contributors can manage. It boils down to who will win in controlling the story: the subject of the book (Laroche), the writer of the book (Orlean), or the screenwriter (played by Nicolas Cage). To make a long story short, the movie was so-so but the orchid descriptions and photos made my wife and I gasp in astonishment. Also, the Laroche character was compelling in an unexplainable way.

So I decided to read the book. The book is non-fiction and thankfully has little to do with the strange plot of the movie. Even if you don't normally read non-fiction, however, you'll like this one as the author uses that fluid, conversational, New Yorker style that pulls you in and delivers interesting anecdotes at just the right times. If you like Updike's writing, you'll enjoy that of Orlean.

The book centers, above all, on the fine line between passion and obsession. This dangerous transition is personified in real-world orchid figure Laroche of south Florida. While innocuously building a nursery business with his wife, he finds success and outlet for his passion for plants.

But as disaster besets him (fatal car crash, hurricane, divorce, financial woes, legal trouble), we start to see what really makes him tick. He is a survivor, a quick thinker, a schemer, a dreamer and, unlike most of us, a just-do-it person. Throughout his life he has a knack for focusing on something, quickly becoming an expert at it, and transforming that passion into a vocation.

Orchids, however, pull him into the land of obsession. We can see this by comparing Laroche with a spectrum of figures in the book who observe orchids with varying degrees of appreciation, lust, envy, wonder, nurture, exploitation, conservation and commercialization. Along the way we learn about the history of orchids in the Western culture, their natural habitats from the cloud forests of South America to the hot, humid jungles of southeast Asia. The author tells us how difficult it is to grow orchids from seed, but how emotionally and financially rewarding it can be to design your own orchid hybrid. Finally, we are told that orchids are immortal, with many plants alive for several human generations, being passed on with reverence, and are still going strong today.

This book contains much, well-researched information on orchids, orchid hunters, orchid growers, and orchid shows and societies but it is, most of all, an illustration of the phenomenon of human passion and obsession: the distinction being that passion is motivating and guiding whereas obsession is reckless and self-destructive. In obsession, the thing outside becomes more valuable than the self-image, and crazy actions are espoused. Hence Larouche's scheme to build an orchid lab on Native American soil, use their legal exemptions to collect wild ghost orchids from otherwise protected state preserves, and aim to be the first to clone and grow in quantity the extremely rare ghost orchid.

Laroche, missing a few front teeth and uttering phrases mixing plant names (in latin) with profanity embodies, in one man, the interesting mix of high culture and low intrigue that seem married to the international trade of orchids. Thankfully the book goes deep into the man Larouche, of his motivations and excesses, of his passions and interior wounds. This man, who is also the most compelling portion of the film adaptation of the book, is carefully plumbed in this non-fiction work.

The result of all this, for the reader, is a great appreciation for the evolutionary success of orchids, the importance of preserving them, shock at what people will do to acquire them, and perhaps a better understanding of why some people pursue things to their destruction while others can play in the same space, with wholesome enjoyment, forever.

I should warn you that, after the movie and the book, my curiousity of orchids led me to read five or six non-fiction, how-to books on orchid cultivation. I can report, based upon those other works, that the research in 'The Orchid Thief' is very good. There are little inaccuracies, mainly with regards to the claim that orchids have no natural enemies. A more correct statement is that they have not many natural enemies. However, I'm learning from my local orchid group, they still suffer from things like fungal rot, red spider mites and orchid viruses that can attack them. So while they don't seem to senesce or kill themselves through aging (they probably don't need to, since they reproduce so infrequently) they can in fact die of from these competitors, pests, and diseases.

So, yes, I'm growing an orchid plant now and have my eyes on a few others. Let's hope I keep my interest in the realm of passion, and avoid all the extremes of obsession highlighted in 'The Orchid Thief.' And wherever Larouche is now, my hat's off to you for your courage, ingenuity, resourcefulness, wit, charm, and--most of all--your passion!

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Summary: Obsession is a good word to describe this world
Review: Susan Orlean enters the orchid collecting world and grants the reader access into this mania of obsession, lust and envy that these collectors face in their pursuit of these flowers. Starting by focusing on John Laroche, a "collector" who becomes involved some interesting adventures in search of orchids, Orlean shifts gears by giving the reader insight into the history of collecting, orchid shows where the competition is particularly fierce, and finally the dark side of this hobby. Writing in a style that is informative without ever being boring, Orlean succeeds in bringing the reader very close to the innate mania involved in this pursuit of "beauty." While I'm sure other hobbies suffer from these manias, THE ORCHID THIEF is a wonderful example of a book that tells how a wonder of the natural world becomes the object of man's covetousness.

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Summary: good book if you like history
Review: I enjoyed the book and thought all the Orchid and Florida history very interesting. I would have liked to see more of the Orchid thief himself as well as the other orchid collectors. Would have added another dimension if the author wrote about the psychological aspects of being orchid obsessed.