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Summary: Blends botany lore with first-person experiences
Review: Orchid Fever provides plant enthusiasts with a treatise on horticultural collecting and travel, examining how horticulturalists work, following the author on his worldwide journeys in search of orchids and plants, and blending botany lore with first-person experiences. Lay readers and natural history readers alike will relish its contents.
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Summary: Six thumbs up!
Review: All six people in our book club liked this one--a first since I've been a member (2 years). It's a great read. Wacky characters that are too "out there" to be made up. Smuggling. International intrigue. Obsession. The law of unintended consequences. Stupidity and/or corruption in high places. Big laughs. Environmental outrage.Hansen puts himself in the book as the active narrator, not in the heroic mold but, charmingly and candidly, as a guy who is just following his own curiousity and who often is mistaken in his intitial understanding of what is going on. Pick this book up and read the first paragraph. If you can walk away from it at that point, the book is not for you.
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Summary: Orchid lover Fever strikes author
Review: Orchid Fever is a state of obsession. We all have something we're obsessed with: politics, the abortion issue, our spouses sexual history. Readers of my reviews know of my personal obsessions with Richard Nixon which have even led me to tracing the path a play by Russell Lees titled "Nixon's Nixon" has taken via the internet for the last 4 years. People with Orchid Fever may just be the most obsessed people on the planet. What Eric Hansen has done is trek the world, finding those with Orchid Fever, and chronicled their lives and stories. Perhaps the only obsession ranking with those with Orchid Fever is that obsession Mr. Hansen has. Towards the end of the book, a colleague of his tells him he has Orchid Fever as he is attempting to find a particular French teenager. He comes to agree with his colleague, but I beg to differ. Mr. Hanson has a different obsession altogether and we are blessed for this fact; Eric Hansen is obsessed by the stories of those who suffer from Orchid Fever. I cannot do justice to the vignettes in this book; from the Japanese businessman who worried about his greenhouse before the safety of his wife during an earthquake, to the aforementioned French teenager who has turned a three story apartment building into a single unit containing jungle like rooms, laboratories, office space, etc., Eric Hansen perfectly captures the lust these people share. There are sixteen chapters and each is in itself a wonderful story about somebody trapped within the confines of Orchid Fever and what it has done to them. The other predominant theme of the book explains the lunacy of CITES, the organization that controls inter-country travel of animals and fauna. The gestapo like tactics of this organization will have you infuriated by the end of the book. My only complaint is that there is no suggestion on how to help eliminate this problem for Fever sufferers in the future.
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Summary: General point -- coercion fails
Review: Thoughts about not just "orchid cops" but cops in general, the whole issue of status versus contract, came forcefully to mind while I was reading this book.
Orchids are beautiful and endangered flowers, "protected" by an international agreement known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITIES. Hansen spent a lot of time with the Penan villagers of Borneo some years back. In order to help these villagers develop a cash crop, Hansen devised what he thought was a practical plan for an orchid nursery. Of course, to a pragmatist this doesn't seem at odds with the goal of protecting orchids from extinction it is in fact a means to that end, a harnessing of the profit motive for that cause. To his shock, Hansen discovered that CITIES stood in his way.
He quotes a scientist friend who told him, "It is perfectly legal to flood an orchid habitat with a hydroelectric dam, log it, level the hillsides for a road, build a golf course on the site, or burn the jungle to the ground for agricultural purposes, but CITIES' influence and rules makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to salvage the plants and sell them." Hansen was intrigued enough to study the question and provide us with this book. He profiles several men, and some women, who have each been portrayed in the international press as scheming orchid pirates threatening the ecosystem for a quick buck. He finds them to be, in fact, pragmatic conservationists. Read it not only for the point, but to make the acquaintance of Eleanor Kerrigan, Terry Root, Ali Kumbaser, Au Yong Nag Yip, and especially Dr. Guido Braem, whose encounter with CITIES regulations has a positively Kafkaesque feel to it.
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Summary: Orchid Fever
Review: Being a recent victim of Orchid Fever myself, I was delighted to find this book. I relished every page and to my astonishment and at first, horror, realized I fit right in and am a 'paph person'. I happened to be in Florida while reading this book and had visited Marie Selby Gardens the day my sister and I sought out a couple of remote growers in the area. I had not read the chapter yet on the confiscated collection. No wonder they eyed us so suspiciously, esp. when I said where we'd been earlier and then asked if they had any paph's! They probably thought us to be CITES people though we weren't toting any machine guns with attack dogs. We were in a PT Cruiser however. I have recommended this book to several people who are not orchid people and they enjoyed it as well. We all had a feeling of disbelief of what can go on within 'well-meaning' agencies. The orchid characters described by Eric Hansen are so endearing that I am proud to stand up and be counted now as one of the 'paph people' or 'orchid people'. This was the most entertaining books I have read in a long time and I highly recommend it to people who love orchids, don't know what an orchid is and ESPECIALLY to the grower's themselves. But if you are one of the people who don't know orchids, beware, you will notice them now and it is impossible not to take one home :). I look forward to future books authored by Eric Hansen.
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Summary: Orchid Police vs. Orchid Lovers
Review: "Orchid Fever" is a book with a mission to inform its readers about the evil (or misguided and blundering) bureaucracy of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and its mistreatment of orchids and orchid collectors. Eric Hansen makes his case over and over again about CITES' blunders into the rarified world of orchidists, including the confiscation and slaughter of thousands of rare, nursery-grown orchids under the auspices of conserving them.
"Blind rage, crippling jealousy, and wild exaggeration are commonplace in the quirky and insular world of orchid growing..." but Hansen still manages to make a good case against CITES' mishandling of endangered (and not so endangered) flora. He also intersperses his polemic with tales of wonderfully eccentric orchidists, monstrous orchid judges, and of course, the outrageously beautiful courtesans of the plant world themselves: the orchids. If you think of orchid growing as an octogenerian's hobby in league with quilting or stamp collecting, here is Hansen's description of a wholesale orchid grower's catalogue: "I thumbed through the pages to familiarize myself with the range of flower forms. Immediately I was confronted with centerfolds showing downy, smooth petals and moistened, hot-pink lips that pouted in the direction of tautly curved shafts and heavily veined pouches." By all means, read this book if you want to learn why your great-auntie Em ditched her crochet-work and is now growing those weird-looking flowers on her sun porch.
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Summary: Eric Hansen's Orchid Fever
Review: So. An unholy syndicate of orchid poachers conspires with a clique of effete, jaded billionaires to loot the jungle of its orchid treasures, robbing future generations of their botanical birthright. But look! Here come the white hats from Kew Gardens and the CITES apparatus (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) to smite the evil doers and spare the orchids from extinction! Hurrah for the institutional solution! Sic 'em, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service! Yes, thanks to the customs department and its plant police we can finally relax, saved from those shameful folks who would raise orchids! Author Eric Hansen probes more deeply than these simplistic presumptions about the craven motives of the orchid collector and the beneficence of the regulatory agencies. In fact, could it be that the players in this drama are wearing each other's colors? That maybe the orchid smuggler is actually engaged in the most effective form of conservation by salvaging a wider sample of a species' gene pool for ex situ propagation? (And doing so not with the cooperation of a grateful public, but in spite of the obstacles and risks of criminal penalties dictated by the benighted bureaucracy?) And could it be that the plant police are truly the irresponsible ones, literally condemning the orchid to the maw of the bulldozer by forbidding its rescue even in the very hour that its habitat is laid waste? Such absurd logic is so provocative and indefensible that Mr. Hansen could be excused for reacting to the folly of CITES, Kew, and Phil Cribb by whacking them upside the head. But he never rants. Rather, he delicately lets the players tell their own stories, make their own admissions, confess, if not flaunt, their own arbitrariness, and get tangled in their own contradictions. The effect is devastating. Eric Hansen deserves credit, not for mocking the misguided, but for being restrained and providing them a platform where they skewer themselves, in their own words, at their own pace. He gives pause to the naïve, knee-jerk conservationist and compels a rethinking of the uncritical abdication of so much authority to a high-handed, power-tripping elite. Read Orchid Fever and you may well wonder whether it is orchids that are endangered, or common sense. I read this book out loud with my favorite ladyslipper orchid, Paphiopedilum stonei, 'Terpsichore' - I asked her if she felt better off now than she did eleven years ago, before the heroes at CITES had listed her on their infamous Appendix I for her own good. "With friends like that ..." she began.
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Summary: Thanks to Eric Hansen!
Review: I loved this book and read it in one day. It is everything the other reviewers have stated. It also spurred me on to identify all the wild orchids that grow around my vacation place. Because of this book I have a new appreciation of them.So thank you!
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Summary: Armchair Travelers Delight
Review: Eric Hansen's Stranger in the Forest was the first non-fiction book that I really fell in love with. Even if orchids don't capture your imagination, you'll appreciate this book as a superb piece of writing and a wonderful expression of insatiable curiousity. Not to take anything away from Mr. Hansen's masterful book, but if you enjoyed this you might also enjoy Leslie Marmon Silko's "Garden in the Dunes", a novel with orchid hunting as one of it's subplots. Don't miss Mr. Hansen's other works which are equally engaging and de rigeur for any armchair traveler.
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Summary: A Hoot to Read!
Review: I picked this book up at the library in a hurry thinking that I had found the orchid book that had been in the news (I learned later that was Susan Orlean's book, not this one). Lucky mistake. I found Eric Hansen's book outrageously funny and very well written. The orchid world he describes is something I never could have imagined!
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