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 spaghetti and a liking for life at the edge of
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