Ballantine Books. - The orchid thief: a true story of beauty and obsession

FASCINATING A RARE AND EXOTIC TALE
THAT SHOWS A JOURNALISTS GIFTS IN FULL BLOOM.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Orlean is a superb tour guide through the loony subculture of Floridas orchid fanciers, and a writer whose sentences can glow like rare blooms, as when she reports that the air above an orchid swamps sinkholes has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet.

Time

A zestfully informative and entertaining read. Orleans writerly verve handily matches the passions of her orchid-lovers, in a book that positively blooms with exotic sights and eccentric personalities.

The Seattle Times

Uproarious or understated, [Orlean] often writes with a smile on her lips. And shes game for anything. You have to admire an author who absolutely hates mucking around in scum-covered, alligator-infested waters, with companions as dubious as a work party from a local prison, yet does so to capture the story. And to deliver a priceless line: I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes. In Orleans position, hate was a perfectly understandable emotion. From where I sat, safe and dry in the reading chair of my orchid-free living room, a different feeling arose: Love at first read.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Orleans gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description. The landscapes of John Laroche and the state of Florida elicit some of her best writing. Laroche has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the bulk and shape of a coat hanger. Of Floridas beauty, she writes: The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk beautiful in the way a Persian carpet is beautifulthick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness. Such rapturous evocations are reason enough to read Orleans book; her overabundance of information is gravy.

The Boston Sunday Globe

AN ECCENTRIC, ILLUMINATING, HILARIOUS BOOK THAT IS AS BEWITCHING AS THE RARE SPECIMENS IT DESCRIBES.
New York Daily News

The delicate beauty of exotic blossoms inspires eccentric collectors and swamp-smart suppliers alike in this true-life South Florida smuggling mystery.

People (Worth a Look feature)

If you liked Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this new nonfiction work by Susan Orlean will hold you utterly spellbound. Like many orchids, its a beautiful hybrid: part crime story, part exotic read. Led by the title character, a charismatic plant smuggler, youll journey with Orlean through a strangely fascinating, almost mystical, subculture.

Glamour

Between hardcovers, nobody but Carl Hiaasen can talk Florida to me the way Susan Orlean has in The Orchid Thief, which so richly captures the Sunshine States bizarre personality, its fevered optimism, its hurricane whims of passion, the hard heat of those not always legal dreams that have made its citizens notorious. Orlean has crafted a classic tale of tropic desire, steamy and fragrant and smart and entertaining.

BOB SHACOCHIS

Orleans hilarious and clever take on the spectacularly hybrid culture of South Florida seems lifted out of one of novelist Carl Hiaasens black humor talesbut with a major difference: Hiaasen makes his stuff up and Orlean doesnt.

Orlando Sentinel

ENDLESSLY FASCINATING VIVID AND DRAMATIC [ORLEAN IS] AN EXTRAORDINARY GUIDE FOR A TOUR OF SUCH A MYSTERIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL SUBJECT.
The Denver Post

[An] absorbing and frequently hilarious new book Orleans excels at physical description and characterization. By the time youve turned a dozen pages of The Orchid Thief, the Florida humidity seems draped like a sticky shawl over your shoulders.

Memphis Commercial Appeal

The Orchid Thief is the finest piece of nonfiction Ive read in years: characters so juicy and wonderfully weird they might have stepped out of a novel, except these people are real. The Orchid Thief is everything we expect from the very best literature. It opens our eyes to an extraordinary new universe and stirs our passion for the people who populate the world. Susan Orlean is a writer of immense talent. I would follow her anywhere.

JAMES W. HALL

Orleans true tale of smugglers, spies, and swamp things rivals the murky intrigue of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. No author searching for a protagonist could have done better than Floridas orchid thief John Laroche, who, when not scheming against the law, introduced her to the feverish world of botanical obsession. The result is a chronicle bizarre enough to entertain even those whod kill a cactus.

Marie Claire

Wondrously dark, oddly erotic Orlean weaves a tale of greed, federal protection, and pistil lust as curvaceously compelling as Chandlers detective noir.

Philadelphia City Paper

ENCHANTING MESMERIZING.
St. Petersburg Times

Hot orchids are the starting point of Susan Orleans account of plants and people obsessed with them in the weird world that is south Florida. Along the way, she meets Seminoles, alligators, and a variety of crazy white men. The Orchid Thief provides further, compelling evidence that truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, it makes most entertaining reading.

ANDREW WEIL

Damp heat, bugs, wild hogs, snapping turtles, poisonous snakesand orchids Wouldnt have missed it.

New York Newsday

[A] terrific, bizarre, often hilarious story about the strange lure of orchids, obsession, and that old devil, John Laroche You dont have to be a plant fanatic to appreciate the powerful forces that compel a person to collect these enchanting little flowers.

News-Leader (Springfield, MO)

Susan Orleans prose is always lucid, lyrical, and deceptively comfortable, but with The Orchid Thief shes in danger of launching a national epidemic of orchid mania. The passion is infectious and addictive.

KATHERINE DUNN

OFFBEAT AND ABSORBING

Orleans shows an amazing deftness at weaving such dark history together with portrayals of wacky orchid fanatics, scientific explanations, and personal observation into a compelling, page-turning narrative. Like the best investigative reporters, she has found an eye-opening story in a place where you would have least expected it. Yet her prose is leavened by a down-to-earth sense of humor and poetic insight. Whatever species of book The Orchid Thief is, its a rare one, and one you dont want to pass up while its in bloom.

Sunday Tribune Review (Greensburg, PA)

Orlean writes in a keenly observant mode reminiscent of John McPhee and Diane Ackerman. In prose as lush and full of surprises as the Fakahatchee itself, Orlean connects orchid-related excesses of the past with exploits of the present so dramatically an orchid will never just be an orchid again.

Booklist

The orchid fanatics [Orlean] describes are mesmerizing and her vivid prose brings the intoxicating blooms right up to nose level. For less money than a plane ticket, The Orchid Thief will take you on a memorable trip from the dead of winter to Floridas hothouse.

Free Lance Star

Susan Orlean plunges into the world of orchid collectors to create a book that is meticulously researched and written in the pleasing, flowing prose of books like The Perfect Storm and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Anyone interested in orchids, Florida, the collecting mentality, fixation, or just good nonfiction will enjoy