The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession - Susan Orlean Audiobook

Written by Susan Orlean
Read by Jennifer Meyers
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
· Release date: 08-03-01
· Publisher: Random House Audio

John Laroche hopes to clone a rare orchid, POLYRRHIZA LINDENII, and benefit financially from the hybrid. Instead, he is arrested for stealing the endangered blossoms. Journalist Susan Orlean sees a news item about the arrest, senses a story, and begins a journey as strange as a slog through the Fakahatchee Swamp in Florida’s Everglades.

The Orchid Thief is the true story of John Laroche, an obsessed Florida plant dealer willing to go to any lengths to steal rare and protected wild orchids and clone them, all for a tidy profit. But the morality of Laroche’s actions does not drive the narrative of Orlean’s strange, compelling, and hilarious book. She is much more interested in the spectacle this unusual man creates through his actions, including one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors.

She follows Laroche deep into Florida’s swamps, tapping into not only the psyche of the deeply opinionated Laroche but also the wider subculture of orchid collectors, including aristocrats, fanatics, and smugglers whose obsession with plants is all-consuming. Orlean portrays the weirdness of it all in wonderful detail, but, ultimately, the book is primarily about passion itself and the amazing lengths to which people will go to gratify it.

“…. Enthusiastic narration by Jennifer Jay Myers highlights Orlean’s eye for exquisite detail of flora and fauna. Myers conveys the author’s witty take on obsession-driven collectors, outrageous conmen, and Laroche’s eventual trial. Orlean’s descriptions are as exotic as the orchids themselves, and in some of the more bizarre stories, she sounds like a nonfiction Hiaassen. Of course, at the center are the magnificent orchids and their ability to inspire passion, obsession, compulsion–and the highly contagious “orchidelirium.” …. AudioFile