Customer Reviews

The Orchid Thief

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(30)

 

 

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.

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.

The author 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."

"The Orchid Thief" is an expansion of an article written for "The New Yorker." It is well worth your while to read the book. The author enlarges on the history of collecting orchids, orchid hunters, and the flower itself. She is to be commended for her research on all and the Seminole Indians as well. Did you know the Seminoles are technically still at war with the United States? They are the only tribe that never signed a treaty.

The title character, John LaRoche is almost-but-not-quite worth the focus he receives. He has a quirky mindset, an enthusiasm that is catching; but his total self-absorption gets tiresome. His knowledge and keenness for the art and science of plants is entertaining. But hey, the guy is a small time crook, a trail of unrealized dreams, and a very poor friend. In spite of many denials, I think Susan had more than a mild crush on him; why else put up with all his inconsiderate nonsense?

The description of the various orchids is masterful, (How I wished for color plates!) and Susan was vivid in all interior and exterior moods in her depiction of Florida. So much so, I would state southern Florida is the underlying theme of the book. Her experiences and bravery in the beastly Fakahatchee Swamp, home of many wild orchids, are dramatic. Plunging into brackish water up to the waist, and having to toe around for submerged alligators on the squishy bottom is not for the faint of heart.

Part of the enjoyment of this fine non-fictional work is the very likeable Susan herself. She tends to be shy, hates the heat, is homesick, tired of driving all over, fears the swamp, but she persists. The end result is well worth her efforts.

Susan Orlean has really done it this time. She has written a book about, "passion itself, and the amazing lengths to which people will go to gratify it." Is it any wonder that her readers feel so passionately about this book. Many orchid experts find fault with the book's facts and criticize the lack of passion for orchids from Ms. Orlean while lovers of a good story and that crazy world known as south Florida rave about it. For my part, I enjoyed reading the Orchid Thief. It reads like a novel, so while I did notice a horticultural error or two myself, I was not reading it as a reference book, but for entertainment. I didn't find it to be quite the page turner I was expecting, but the characters are memorable, the stories are interesting and Ms. Orlean's writing is a pleasure. I am an amazon.com associate.

This book is about the orchid growing scene in Florida and goes on at length about smuggling of native plants from the local preserve as well as around the world, the big orchid shows held there, the feuds between the prominent growers in the area and the generally wacky demeanor of the various colorful characters involved in the activities of orchid "society" in this suspiciously hot and humid local.

If you have ever belonged to a specialty horticutural society and questioned your sanity when caught up in the thrall of your favorite plant, this book will make you feel like the very picture of placid normalcy when compared to orchid growers.

Humorous, and a quick read, I recommend this book to all those plant persons who are not afraid of seeing perhaps the tiniest fragment of themselves reflected in the fascinatingly consumed characters portrayed in this book.

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".

I was actually a little disappointed with this book, having just read several rave reviews of it in the big year end "Best of"s in Time Magazine, the New York Times, and in one of the local papers here in Pittsburgh. Yet there are a lot of positive things that would make me lean toward recommending this book to someone else. It has several sections that really are fascinating and very well written, with the kind of attention to the minute details of real life that make non-fiction books like this so much fun to read. It also offers a pretty interesting glimpse into a world that most of us have never experienced or even heard about, namely that of Orchids and the men and women who live for them (sounds like a Jerry Springer Show topic, actually, and many of these people would fit right in on that show). It also includes a handful of completely off-kilter real life characters--ranging from a Seminole chief who plays rock and roll during the day and hunts endangered species at night to the main character, who begins the book as a free-lance (and semi-legal) botanist and ends the book as a purveyor of internet porn--who really jump off the page at you. And I always like those kinds of books that really draw you in to new worlds. In these aspects, the book really reminded me of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But having made that comparison, the book really does pale next to Midnight. Ms. Orlean never gets close enough to these people to really satisfy me and she never really dips deeper into their characters than to wonder at their slightly goofy, slighty compelling veneers. She even admits several times that she resisted getting too close to these people, as if they carried some kind of "orchid fever" that she could catch, eventually giving away all the orchids they gave her as presents and refusing to buy any at the shows she covered. Maybe if she had allowed herself to get imersed in the scene, then this would have been a better book. And my personal pet peeve: she repeats things--a lot. And not just once or twice, either. Some anecdotes, facts and stories are related three or four times, sometimes within pages of one another. I imagine this is because she was trying to flesh out what began as a magazine article into a full-length book, but there is a point in there where the editor definitely should have stepped in. So, overall, I can give a slight recommendation on the subject matter and a few very compelling passages alone. But my overall impression on finishing this book is that I find it very interesting that these people are spending their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and risking prison time to acquire and grow these beautiful plants, but I'm left thinking that the question of "Why?" should have been answered better.

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-

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).

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.