The Orchid Thief

"Yes, this is such a fun book, all about obsession, history and botany. To a limited extent it also engages with the author’s internal experience as she acknowledges the envy she feels for people graced with this level of attachment to the world. To do this, she looks back in history – tracing the earliest orchid hunters to their roots, if you will – and then drifts among contemporary collectors who are certainly an odd and often fanatical bunch. In terms of content, this book falls almost perfectly between the first and second. It has a ton of factual material and is hugely instructive, like Ship of Gold, but also manages to focus deeply on less tangible aspects of human experience, as Griffin does. Orlean’s writing is fresh and very lively. Interestingly, the book became a superb movie too, Adaptation. These are fun to teach together and anyone who enjoys the book will probably love how the film plays with what is on the page and takes up how hard it is to translate this kind of material from one genre to another that plays by different rules. It is rare that you have a great book that also ends up as a terrific film. The Orchid Thief begins with this crazy character, John Laroche, who has devised an ingenious but totally immoral plan to go into the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve in Florida, to collect rare and endangered plants. His plan is to use men from a local tribe essentially as front men to collect rare species that Laroche can then reproduce and sell. While Laroche is prohibited by law from collecting, the Indians are not, since the law gives them special rights because the swamp and its contents are considered part of their unique heritage. This is really just a scam for Laroche to make money, but he rationalises it every which way and his character is the glue that holds the narrative together. While Orlean uses him to tell the tale, she also takes licence to travel widely through history and botany so we can peer into what drove Laroche in this enterprise and others. Somehow it all works. Susan Orlean came upon this topic when she read a brief newspaper account about Laroche being arrested in the swamp. She went to his trial in Florida and that trial led her into this longer project. The Orchid Thief grew out of a shorter piece that originally appeared in The New Yorker."