The Orchid Thief - Rilegato

Susan Orlean writes like a dream. The Orchid Thief is a horticultural page-turner, quite possibly the first of its kind. But even if you couldn't care less about orchids, Orlean's tale stands as a riveting dissection of the collector's obsession, and the peculiar state of mind and nature that is contemporary Florida."                                        
--Michael Pollan

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 State's 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 Shacoch1s

The Orchid Thief is the finest piece of nonfiction I've 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

Hot orchids are the starting point of Susan Orlean's 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 We1l

Susan Orlean's prose is always lucid, lyrical, and deceptively comfortable, but with The Orchid Thief, she's in danger of launching a national epidemic of orchid mania. The passion is infectious and addictive."                    
--Katherine Dunn

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. Her articles have also appeared in Outside, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire. She is the author of Saturday Night, a New York Times Notable Book of 1990, which, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, "calls to mind Damon Runyon, Evelyn Waugh, and screwball comedy." She lives in New York City.