Share <Embed>

Buy New

$10.74

List Price: $17.00
Save: $6.26 (37%)

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

This item ships to France. Want it Monday, Sept. 10? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

Deliver to

Buy Used

$7.05

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Deliver to

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Rocket Books 🚀

Fulfilled by Amazon

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Other Sellers on Amazon

Add to Cart

$6.75

Sold by: Wiz Kid 54

Add to Cart

$6.88
+ $46.50 shipping

Sold by: Aliza Mesbahi

Add to Cart

$13.49
& FREE Shipping on eligible orders. Details

Sold by: summerbreezebooks

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 2 images

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Paperback – January 4, 2000

by Susan Orlean (Author)

311 customer reviews

in Orchid Gardening

See all 26 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$10.62

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$36.98

$31.11

$0.40

Paperback

"Please retry"

$10.74

$4.41

$0.25

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Audio CD, Abridged, Audiobook, CD

"Please retry"

$23.10

$8.99

$3.90

Unknown Binding

"Please retry"

$17.48

$13.97

$1.63

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion.

In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay.

Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.

Praise for The Orchid Thief

“Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times

“Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe

“A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal

Frequently bought together

Total price: $28.28

Buy the selected items together

This item:The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Susan Orlean Paperback $10.74
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson Hardcover $17.54
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Eric Hansen

103

Paperback
$13.95
Kirk Wallace Johnson

130

Hardcover
$17.54
Nicolas Cage

558

DVD
$6.48
Charlie Kaufman

558

Paperback
$14.87
Susan Orlean

261

Paperback
$10.75
Susan Orlean

3

Hardcover
$18.30

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times

“Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe

“A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal

From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

In Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native Amer-ican activists, and devoted orchid collectors. The result is a tale that is strange, compelling, and hilarious.
"New Yorker writer Susan Orlean followed Laroche through swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida's orchid collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, fanatics, and smugglers whose obsession with plants is all-consuming. Along the way, Orlean learned the history of orchid collecting, discovered an odd pattern of plant crimes in Florida, and spent time with Laroche's partners, a tribe of Seminole Indians who are still at war with the United States.
There is something fascinating or funny or truly bizarre on every page of The Orchid Thief: the story of how the head of a famous Seminole chief came to be displayed in the front window of a local pharmacy; or how seven hundred iguanas were smuggled into Florida; or the case of the only known extraterrestrial plant crime. Ultimately, however, Susan Orlean's book is about passion itself, and the amazing lengths to which peoplewill go to gratify it. That passion is captured with singular vision in The Orchid Thief, a once-in-a-lifetime story by one of our most original journalists.

"From the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product details

Series: Ballantine Reader's Circle
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books; 13th edition (January 4, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 044900371X
ISBN-13: 978-0449003718
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 311 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Landscape Design > Flowers > Orchids
- #7 in Books > Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Plants > Flowers
- #12 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > South

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Be the first video

Your name here

Customer reviews

Write a customer review

See all 311 customer reviews

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

OKay

Entertaining

February 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

In 1994, John Laroche 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. Susan Orleans, a columnist for The New Yorker went to Florida to get the story. She befriended the weirdly charismatic Laroche, gained entry to the bizarre world of orchid collectors, and ultimately expanded the article into a book (and subsequently a movie).

Ms. Orlean is as much part of this story as anyone else: she's there, she's experiencing this, and her thoughts and curiosity take us through lessons in history, evolution, geology, botany, and current orchid mania - the characters, the controversies, and the competition. Her style includes much wit and humor which makes for somewhat light reading and a few laugh out loud lines.

Front and center are 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." There are tens of thousands of varieties, and more being created by natural as well as man-made hybridization virtually every day. Orchids often outlive human beings. In fact, orchids can theoretically live forever, since they have no natural enemies.

Orlean describes some extreme personalities of orchid people as an amusing side story. Some orchid owners designate a person as an "orchid heir" in their wills since the owners expect that their precious orchids will outlive them. Another reviewer commented: “This book will make you feel like the very picture of placid normalcy when compared to orchid growers.”

“Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves.” Laroche is a kindred spirit of those fellow orchid hunters of the 19th century who rescued fragile flowers in the midst of an erupting volcano in the Phillipines and a revolution in Columbia. An orchid from Burma was auctioned off in London “still attached to the human skull on which it had been found.”

Southern Florida is an underlying theme. Many of us remember the famous land-scams of the 1950s and 60s. “ Florida land is elastic: you can make more of it.” (pg 122) Any dank Florida cypress swamp can be drained and remade… to look like a Tuscan village or an English town. Interesting characters appear every few pages: Snake Boy, frog poachers, Miss Seminole, Lee More the Adventurer, the Ghost Grader, Lord Mansfield, etc.

The Fakahatchee Swamp is home of many wild orchids, Orlean comments wryly when plunging into brackish water up to the waist, and having to toe around for submerged alligators on the squishy bottom, "I hate being in a swamp with machete-wielding convicts."

Indian rights and the Florida Seminole tribe and business interests are another side story. The legal similarities between Chief Billie and the panther and Laroche and the ghost orchids have a fine distinction.

But the orchids! My thoughts are like the authors: “It’s like an explosion in a paint factory…” The flowers are interesting but the plant looks dead. “These flowers are poetic.” They are all so different. This one is speckled. “Here’s a weird shape. Look at this long tube.” The variety is overwhelming.

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Helen

All around goodo book

January 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

Recommended if you are at all interested in l) Florida - the land, 2) Florida - the people, 3) natural history and/or, 4) just a very good read. I read this during my first trip to southern Florida and really enjoyed seeing the places the author talked about. Wonderful character study of both the people and place. Top notch writing.

10 people found this helpful11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Therese Kotch

I loved Susan Orleans style of writing and her descriptions of ...

March 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

I loved Susan Orleans style of writing and her descriptions of places, situations and people - she really brought it to life. I now know more about orchids than I ever thought I would. That part got a bit tedious at times but I stuck with it and most of it was really interesting. There are people addicted to orchids. People who steal orchids. Orchids can be worth A LOT of money. There are hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of orchids. I love the way she wrote about the character of David Laroche. I read this because I knew the movie, "Adaptation" was based on this book. Loosely based. It was REALLY interesting to see what the screenwriter did. It barely ANYTHING like the book. I loved the ending. I also lived in Florida for three years and it all takes place in Florida so I found it interesting to hear Ms. Orleans talk about these places. I got a bit bogged down by all the details of orchid growing, the orchid business, etc. but it's worth it to persevere.

2 people found this helpful3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Lois W.

out of the box story about out of the box people

January 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

i am an orchid crazy, i know, that's a department of redundancy department, i took it along in a tote bag to doctor appointments so it took a long time to finish. people always asked what i was reading because i laughed out loud so often, and one doctor said, "oh that's a great book", and he knew about it from parents who were also orchid crazies.

4 people found this helpful5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Cliff Hays

Just Awesome!

January 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Just awesome! This book came onto my radar because of its starring role in Charlie Kaufman's 2002 film Adaptation. There are four main reasons this book is great:

1. the primary subject John Laroche (to whom the book's title infamously but non-exclusively refers) is an extraordinarily interesting person

2. the author's description of Laroche's personality as well as of her interactions/dialogue with him are amazingly written and 100% engrossing

3. the secondary subject of the book is not orchids like you might expect, it is actually the state of Florida, and the author's descriptions/musings on Florida itself - its strangeness, contrasted nature, and uniqueness in particular - are wonderful

4. there is an underlying theme that ties the whole book together and arises naturally from Laroche, the other orchid collectors/thieves the author meets, as well as from the author herself: it is the nature of passion; and as a result the book is brimming with psychological insights and flashes of wisdom

Charlie Kaufman realized that this was more than just a book about flowers when he read it, and you will realize it too when you read it. Personally I could care less about flowers, but the flower that John Laroche was so passionate about - the ghost orchid - plays such an interesting and mysterious role in the book and is so elusive and sought after by even the author herself that by the end of the book I wanted to see one too!

I highly recommend you read the book and/or watch the movie (in either order), as this is a book wholly deserving of its starring movie role. Unlike any book/movie experience I've ever had.

3 people found this helpful4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Set up a giveaway

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: flower gardening, natural gardening, nursery designs, plant biology, science fiction films, beauty fiction

Buy New

$10.74

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Buy Used

$7.05

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Other Sellers on Amazon

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Paperback – January 4, 2000

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the Inside Flap

Product details

Related Video Shorts (0)

Be the first video

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Customer images

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Buy New $10.74

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Buy Used $7.05

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Other Sellers on Amazon

The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Paperback – January 4, 2000

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the Inside Flap

Product details

Related Video Shorts (0)

Be the first video

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)

Customer reviews

Read reviews that mention

Top customer reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Customer images

Most recent customer reviews

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Buy New

$10.74

Buy Used

$7.05