About book The Orchid Thief: A True Story Of Beauty And Obsession (2000)
You could summarize The Orchid Thief as "Florida is a crazy place, y'all." It's one of the better non-fiction books I've read recently, starting with a scheme by John Laroche, a not-precisely-likeable but still very interesting fellow whom the author interviews and follows around in the course of writing her book, but delving into Victorian orchid cultivation (they had no idea how to grow orchids, especially in England, but they were mad about them) and flower genetics, Florida endangered species laws, and Florida real estate.Orchid collectors, apparently, get really, really obsessed. I can understand this, as I know some people who are into dog and cat shows, and that whole scene is just as silly and obsessive. Orchids, of course, are easier to cultivate and breed for highly specific characteristics, so there are thousands of species and subspecies, and collectors are basically engaged in competitive orchid breeding. Some people will pay thousands for a single plant, and successful orchid breeders who have a popular strain are frequently subjected to break-ins and thefts. There is much drama at orchid shows, people flinging accusations (like claiming you've bred a new strain that was actually smuggled from Thailand) and threats, and meanwhile, poachers can make a good living stealing rare orchids out of protected Florida wetlands for breeders. (They also poach frogs, birds, trees, and pretty much anything else that's endangered and therefore valuable.) This has been going on for over a hundred years; the Victorians had their own "orchid bubble" and they hired people to go to Florida or South America to collect specimens for them.Most everything in this book centers on Florida, though, and so Susan Orleans goes beyond orchids talking about all kinds of other schemes Florida has been subjected to. There is the long-running saga of the Seminole tribe, an Indian tribe that owned slaves and sided with the Confederacy but whose slaves were pretty much tribe members. The Seminoles were the first tribe to get rich off of casinos, so they are pitched all sorts of business deals by everyone from Donald Trump to Japanese investors. Orleans talks quite a bit about James Billie, the current and former chief of the Seminoles, including his trial for shooting an endangered Florida panther.There is also a chapter about the infamous Gulf American Land Corporation, which made "Florida swampland" so famous as a real estate scam. They sold thousands of plots of land to working class people, military personnel, etc., as affordable retirement investments. Many of these people never even visited the land they'd bought and so were unaware that more likely than not you needed a boat to reach it. Gulf American was still in operation up until 1970, and the plots are still there - a few people actually moved into the "development" area and live there still, without electricity or telephones or anything else. Crazy people, y'all.
If you are a student looking for a term paper topic, I have it: compare/contrast Percy Harrison Fawcett, the subject of David Grann's book The Lost City of Z to John Laroche, the person charged with the title crime in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Focused on events roughly 70 years apart, these two books, the two most recent I've read, feature characters that would seem to have little in common. Fawcett, a British military officer, member of the Royal Geographical Society, and leader of several successful explorations into the Amazon in the early part of the 20th century, and Laroche, inveterate schemer, swinger-for-the-fence, and accused purloiner of orchids, at first seem as different as the times and locations in which they grew up.But a glance at the subtitles of the two books yields their greatest similarity: Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon; Thief: A true story of beauty and obsession. And there it is. Both books are about obsession, Fawcett's to find the City of Z, something so unspecific that it's not even known how he arrived at the city's letter-name, and Laroche's to clone and sell Polyrrbiza lindenii, the ghost orchid.In Thief Orlean provides insights into the obsessive world or orchid hunters, growers, self-made botanists, and schemers. Part history, part geography, part biology,the background information she researched and shares in the book cultivates as rich and well-tended environment for the men and women featured as do they for their orchids. And what characters! Laroche, the 36-year-old cigarette-smoking, f-bomb dropping "mastermind" of the plot to remove ghost orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand and to begin cloning them, Bob Fuchs, the never-natty middle school teacher turned orchid grower extraordinaire, and Lee Moore the Adventurer, still looking for one last adventure.Orlean's prose is pure and clean, with wry twists of humor and a style that I would guess matches the thoughts in her head very closely. On page 256 she writes "The orchid world had the intimacy of a family and the fights of a family. Like a family it is small and sometimes crowded and sometimes bickering circle....it was some king of way to scratch out a balance between being and individual and being part of something bigger than yourself." One last similarity between Z and Thief. Just as Grann goes to South America and retraces the footsteps of Fawcett, so Orlean travels to South Florida and persuades Laroche to lead her into the Fakahatchee Strand. What the two authors find is awaiting readers at the end of each book.On a personal note, Orlean's travels between West Palm Beach and Miami as she follows Laroche and his trial resonates with me as I am a resident of South Florida and travel some of roads past some of the stores, nurseries, and parks as she. This book is a great read and even better when read along with The Lost City of Z.
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I will never look at an orchid the same way. Susan Orlean was writing for the New Yorker when she heard about a man, John LaRoche, who was being brought up on charges of stealing Orchids from the Fakahatchee Swamp which is a state protected habitat. Orlean flew down to Florida to interview this man for a story for the New Yorker and ended up writing a book. The book covers everything from the survival instincts of the orchid to the men who died for the orchids.In the 1800's there was money to be made from orchids so wealthy growers would hire orchid collectors to go to Africa, Nepal, South America, and every other random place in the world to find orchids and take every one they could find. Collectors would send tons (eight tons in one case) back to Europe and keep on trekking in other areas. The collectors would kill each other, give false leads and often times die in the pursuit of orchids. Today it is still kind of crazy. People have to show up to orchid shows with body guards. Thebiggest orchid dealers still sue each other and make crazy accusations about each other. I learned a lot from this book. I would recommend this to anyone who likes a good "The truth is stranger than fiction" type of story.
—Rebekkila
Rex Stout’s fat detective suffered from orchidelirium. He would never vary his routine of working in his famous plant rooms on the top floor of the brownstone house no matter what the emergency, to Archie Goodwin’s consternation.tLike bibliomania, orchidelirium is a mania that involves collecting — unlimited collecting. The orchid is “a jewel of a flower on a haystack of a plant.” Orchids have evolved into the “biggest flowering plant family on earth,” and many survive only in small niches they have carved out for themselves. They are found in many different environments, and human hybridization of the plants creates more varieties all the time. tThose afflicted can never seem to get enough. Susan Orlean describes this mania in her fascinating book, which is a compendium of information about orchids as well. The number of orchid species is unknown, and more are discovered or developed all the time. Larceny among collectors is not unknown, and Orlean describes John Laroche, a man of many manias — he collected turtles, and I mean lots of turtles, as a child. Laroche dreamed of making a fortune by finding the one really rare specimen of plant that he could then breed and sell. Seeing himself as a moral thief, Laroche, rationalized his larcenous behavior. He allied himself with the Seminoles, knowing that they were exempt from federal laws prohibiting the collection of wild orchids, so that he could hopefully collect and breed the rare ghost orchid. His justification was that once bred it would likely no longer be collected illegally. tApparently, flower theft is epidemic in Florida; one case Orlean cites was the theft of a fifteen-foot palm tree. The tree was dug up and the hole filled in during the night. How they managed that with no one noticing is somewhat startling. One farmer lost $20,000 worth of bell peppers from his fields. He decided to get out of the business.tLaroche merely provides anecdotal backdrops for a very interesting history of the mania for orchid collecting.
—Eric_W
I listened to this book, which is probably not the way to go--the narrator's fast pace and continued air of disbelief as she rattled off facts was very tedious--thus the 2 stars. Had I read it I might have given it 3. The book seems like it was about 30 "Talk of the Town" pieces from the New Yorker--which I enjoy-- strung together. Perhaps it actually was. I would have liked to have seen more of a narrative about the actual orchid thief, or her other themes of the nature of passions and communities, which she touched on briefly. Instead it was just a fairly random collection of facts and biographies of orchids and their collectors, with a bit of a story about the main orchid thief thrown in. I listened until the end hoping for some redemption, but it never really came. If you're an orchid person (when I see them at Trader Joe's I think they're pretty, but my interest doesn't go beyond that), you'll probably really enjoy it. It did confirm a lot of my impressions of Florida--i.e. that it's a big swamp inhabited by strange, unappealing people-- but I'm not sure that's a good thing.
—Amy
