Rating: 
Summary: Quirky, offbeat -- a great escape!
Review: I cracked this book on a flight from Seattle to Chicago and I barely raised my for head for 4 hours. I found protagonist John Laroche a likable albeit maddening dingbat and the little known world of orchid gathering, collecting, and obsessing-over was fascinating to me. What it is about Florida that produces such wildly eccentric characters, in the orchid community as well as the Seminole Indian reservation? An education to be sure and a relaxing, funny read. Hats off to author Susan Orlean for wading in the muck and the heat of the swamps to deliver a vivid picture of what great extremes diehard orchid enthusiasts will do for kicks.
Rating: 
Summary: Creative Nonfiction Makes Great History
Review: I should say, first of all, that I'm getting my PhD in history. I'm not a literary critic, and I'm not as well-read as I'd like to be. But I thought this book was brilliant. It is so incredibly difficult, when writing a "true story," to choose that which is truly important and deeply evocative, that "real" histories usually end up turning fascinating stories into crushing bores. I don't know if the majority of readers appreciates the erudition required to write such a riveting history-- just think that for every tangent the author chose, she had to research several others! Anyway, I loved it-- I loved the frank discussion of her own problems with the orchid world, I loved the effortless links between "history" and "reportage," which really aren't so very different after all, I admire her ability to enter a different (and totally bizarre!) universe and look at it with humor and sympathy, and I think she must be a really interesting person herself. In my opinion, this is a model of writing the history of the present (and I love orchids myself).
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
|
