Mary Keen
Follow the Testicles
The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
By Susan Orlean
Heinemann 352pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Publishers can't get enough of plants that change men's lives – the tulip, the camellia, the nutmeg, the potato. You can go into any bookshop and find a story about some growing thing that has driven men crazy, or made them rich, or turned out to be a panacea to cure a whole nation. Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief belongs to this new, hybrid genre.
This is a book with several themes: people, places and plants. It is a picaresque tale of John Laroche, alias Mr Encyclopedia or Crazy White Man – 'a late-sleeping, heavy-smoking, junk-food eating, law-bending type', with the posture of al dente
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw