3.0
The Orchid Thief
ByPublisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • THE BASIS FOR THE FILM ADAPTATION DIRECTED BY SPIKE JONZE AND STARRING NICOLAS CAGE AND MERYL STREEP
The “eccentric, illuminating, [and] hilarious” (New York Daily News) true story of beauty and obsession in the swamps of Florida and the impassioned individuals who risk everything for the ultimate prize: a rare ghost orchid
“Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times
Meet John Laroche, a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive renegade plant dealer. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole men were arrested with rare ghost orchids—Polyrrhiza lindenii—they had stolen from a wild swamp in South Florida. Laroche had planned to clone the endangered orchids and sell them for a small fortune to impassioned buyers.
In The Orchid Thief, acclaimed journalist Susan Orlean follows 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. This unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture becomes even more bizarre as Orlean details how the head of a famous Seminole chief came to be displayed in the front window of a local pharmacy, how seven hundred iguanas were smuggled into Florida, and the case of the only known extraterrestrial plant crime.
A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is a wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession.
The “eccentric, illuminating, [and] hilarious” (New York Daily News) true story of beauty and obsession in the swamps of Florida and the impassioned individuals who risk everything for the ultimate prize: a rare ghost orchid
“Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times
Meet John Laroche, a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive renegade plant dealer. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole men were arrested with rare ghost orchids—Polyrrhiza lindenii—they had stolen from a wild swamp in South Florida. Laroche had planned to clone the endangered orchids and sell them for a small fortune to impassioned buyers.
In The Orchid Thief, acclaimed journalist Susan Orlean follows 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. This unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture becomes even more bizarre as Orlean details how the head of a famous Seminole chief came to be displayed in the front window of a local pharmacy, how seven hundred iguanas were smuggled into Florida, and the case of the only known extraterrestrial plant crime.
A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is a wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession.
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3.0
“Laroche is different from other unconventional thieves that I’ve read about because he’s not anti-social. He brought other people into his schemes and truly believed that he was doing the right thing by doing the wrong thing.
I really liked Orlean’s alliteration and use of lists in her writing. There were a dozen or so examples of this where she would list ten things at once and I feel like most authors couldn’t pull that off successfully, but I liked how she did it. There were times where I felt like the subject veered off course but overall it was an interesting read.”
About Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992 and has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. She graduated from the University of Michigan and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She now lives in Los Angeles and upstate New York with her husband and son.
Other books by Susan Orlean
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