Average Rating: 
Rating:  - a great read
I'd only recently discovered the great orchid flowers when I read this book. It's beautifully written with a fantastic sense of humour and offers a bizarre and fascinating insight into some truly impressive eccentric minds. You don't need tons of horticultural expertise to enjoy this book , but by the same token, if you are a plantophile, you won't find it too 'dumbed down'. I laughed out loud numerous times reading it, but it's not all humour - it's also a gentle and open-minded foray into a world alien to the author...at the outset, at least. I'd recommend this book highly.
Rating:  - An original, quirky and entertaining book.
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. Orlean 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."
Rating:  - History, Quirky Characters, and Lots of Atmosphere
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.
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