Books: The Orchid Thief By Susan Orlean

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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 its obsessed hobbyists 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, as when she reports that the air above an orchid swamp's sinkholes "has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet."

--By John Skow