The Orchid Thief

Inspired by a short, bizarre newspaper article, journalist Susan Orlean embarks on an amusing two-year journey to understand a passionate, yet somehow principled crook and one of his ephemeral obsessions--wild orchids. Her profile of John Laroche was the basis for the critically acclaimed film, ADAPTATION (2003), directed by Spike Jonze, and starring Nicholas Cage and (as Susan Orlean) Meryl Streep. A New York Times Notable Book for 1999.

"Folding virtue and criminality around profit are [John] Laroche's specialty," Orlean writes of the oddly likable felon who's the subject of her latest book. But what could be virtuous about poaching endangered orchids, which not insignificantly are worth a small fortune? If exotic flowers were cloned, everyone could afford them, Laroche would say. It's just such "amoral morality" that compels New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Saturday Night) to relocate to Naples, Fla., in order to dig into an orchid-collecting subculture as rarefied as its object of desire. Orlean spends two years attempting t - (Publishers Weekly, 11/23/98)

John Laroche is a serial monomaniac who learns everything about Ice Age fossils, then chucks fossils for orchids, becomes a celebrated breeder, then a thief of wild orchids; and finally turns his back on the plant world . . . and dives into computers. As he explains to the author of this loose-jointed but absorbing account, 'When I was a baby I probably got exposed to something that mutated me, and now I'm incredibly smart.' Writer Orlean, at any rate, is a superb tour guide through the loony subculture of Florida's orchid fanciers, and a writer whose sentences can glow like rare blooms.

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