10/28/2022 0 Comments The orchid thiefLaroche has much in common with Bartlett’s own anti-hero, the book thief John Gilkey, between the psychology behind his madness and his ability to rationalize actions that are immoral and often illegal. Instead, she follows the crazy people in the orchid world, each one more eccentric than the last, while also explaining the botany of orchids and why people from so many walks of life become so obsessed with them. Laroche hoped to exploit a loophole in federal laws on taking endangered plants from federally-protected lands by employing Seminole tribe members to take these rare orchids from lands technically under the Seminole Nation’s control, a legal inconsistency that opens up into an ethical quandary over adminstration of lands under Native American control, which Orlean unfortunately chooses not to address. The thief of the book’s title is John Laroche, who was arrested in 1994 while working for the Seminole Nation in Florida as a horticulturalist who wanted to build a nursery and lab that could clone rare orchids, creating a sustainable revenue source for the tribe while feeding Laroche’s own mad obsession with the flowers. The book was adapted, loosely, by Charlie Kaufman for his script for Adaptation., which is more about Kaufman’s difficulty adapting the book for the big screen than it is about the story in the book itself. “Narrative” is only loosely applicable to Orlean’s work, which violates one of my main rules on non-fiction works – unless the author is the subject, the author shouldn’t appear in the book much, if at all – but The Orchid Thief mostly succeeds in spite of Orlean’s heavy presence on the pages because her twin subjects, orchids and the wackadoos who collect them obsessively, are so fascinating. Susan Orlean’s 1998 book The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession showed up in Allison Hoover Bartlett’s The Man Who Loved Books Too Much as one of that author’s favorite narrative non-fiction works, so I grabbed a used copy as soon as I came across one.
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