You could summarize The Orchid Thief as "Florida is a crazy place, y'all." It's one of the better non-fiction books I've read recently, starting with a scheme by John Laroche, a not-precisely-likeable but still very interesting fellow whom the author interviews and follows around in the course of...
I picked this up at the Macomb Friends of the Library book sale last fall because it was a $2 hardback and because the first essay is about something that happened in Springfield, IL (where my sister lives). OH, and because it's by Susan Orlean, one of my all-time favorite writers. But I thought ...
Susan Orlean presents stories of a range of colorful celebrities and everyday citizens in biographies that ran in a number of periodicals, most notably The New Yorker, where she was a staff writer at the time of the collection's publication. She demonstrates a keen capacity to hone in on what mak...
So do most other living things. One day after my trip to Kerry’s Bromeliads, after all the Elaines had disappeared, The Miami Herald reported that frog poachers were hard at work in the Big Cypress Swamp near the Fakahatchee, and that they were poaching two tons of Everglades pig frogs out of the...
She doesn’t know where she’s going from here. She has an apartment in Paris and a house in Beverly Hills, a room key in Manhattan, the story of Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies in her head, and no particular plans. She fidgets around the room. She wants to open the window for you or le...