Paradox Of Modern Life Edition

The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
by Gregg Easterbrook

Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of Gregg Easterbrook’s writing. Some of the articles he has written for The Atlantic, Slate, Wired, The New Republic and others are some of the most interesting and down-to-earth stuff I have consistently read from a journalist. (Some of his collected writings can be found here.) Additionally, his Tuesday Morning Quarterback articles on espn.com always make my Tuesday lunches during NFL season something to look forward to. Because of this, I do not know if I can write an objective review of The Progress Paradox. I have read this book twice now and, to me, it should be required reading for every college-aged human.

But because the book deals with things such as positive psychology and the notion that our lives have undeniably gotten better (much to the behest of the cynics and intellectual community and the media), this book, on the surface, may appear to be of the dreaded optimist ilk. People who would willingly read something that touts our current lives and societies as the apex of genus homo would look like, to cynical people, nothing more than Bambis amongst a forest of darkness. To me, this book combines an outstanding balance of anecdotes, statistical data, and well-rounded opinion to prove that life has, in fact, gotten better for almost everyone on earth while the problems that are affecting the poor in other countries are absolutely solvable. If you do not think they are solvable, just look at the other “insolvable” problems of our modern life: the Cold War, reducing pollution, high-yield farming, the overwhelming decline of crime–all while the earth’s total population doubled from 3 billion people to 6 billion people in roughly 40 years. Instead of a full-on review I will merely include this excerpt from the introduction and slightly expand on a few things and let you decide whether it is worth a purchase.

The book you are about to read will address topics including:

• The ways in which contemporary American and European life grows steadily better, with nearly every trend line positive.
• The actions, from government policy to individual choices, that have caused nearly every trend line to become positive.
• Why huge numbers of people do not appreciate the fact that Western life grows steadily better, or even deny this is happening.
• Why the prosperous, free, and basically decent societies of the United States and Western Europe produce so many citizens who are unhappy.
• Why rapid progress against “unsolvable” problems, such as pollution and crime, should give us hope that “unsolvable” problems of the present, such as global warming and developing world suffering, can be overcome.
• Why even overcoming every problem that exists might not make us any happier.

From here, Easterbrook goes on to detail new theories as to why we are so unhappy despite living in a realized version of Utopia that our ancestors desperately craved to one day live in. They are: “choice anxiety” (choice itself becomes a daily form of anguish); “abundance denial” (creating complex rationales in which people are convinced they are materially deprived in a world of unprecedented material wealth); “collapse anxiety” (theory that America and European Union have reached its highest pinnacle as societies); “revolution of satisfied expectations” (the uneasiness associated with actually attaining the things you dreamed of).

The last part of the book deals with everything ranging from what the negative effects on our culture are from the recent CEO scandals to why Islamic radicals fundamentally rail against modernism.

All in all, a fantastic book that is anything but a puff piece about blindly believing that everything is great. It is very well thought out and nicely presented book of ideas, some of which we consciously ignore on a daily basis possibly because of the mainstream rise in popularity of the idea that life is vapid and worthless as was advanced by the intellectuals of centuries past.

As I said before, I think this book should be required reading for most every person who believes that previous generations had it best or that today’s society is irrevocably ruined. There is a fine line between being pessimistic and being guarded and this book shows that being guarded makes sense because pessimism in these days of unprecedented wealth (in a monetary, spiritual, or societal sense) seems ludicrous when looked at from a bird’s-eye view.

Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper
by Diablo Cody

Humor and eroticism are two things that are highly subjective. Unlike performing arts or music wherein you can defend something with the “classic” card (i.e.-you may not like Bach or Raphael but because you cannot deny their impact, you have to give them much more credit than you would for, say, Bob Seger or Robert Indiana), humor and sex are either funny or sexy; there really is no middle ground. If your friend finds Steven Wright unfunny or Salma Hayek unattractive there will be little you can do to change their mind.

The same logic is applied to Candy Girl, a book that is both funny and deals with sex written by Diablo Cody before her award-winning Juno received praise and awards. If you did not like Juno it will be almost impossible for you to enjoy this book. If you enjoyed the movie like I and many others did, it is a delicious and quickly digestible little gem. (Juno note: while I found the movie to be funny and all-around really good, the ending is what sealed the deal for me. I did not see the poignancy of the letter on the wall coming at all and the use of Cat Power’s version of “Sea Of Love” during the hospital scene gets nothing short of four stars from me. But I digress.)

Men tend to think of themselves as being sexier than they really are while women tend to drastically undervalue their sexiness, instead opting to hunt for and associate themselves with their deficiencies–however real or imagined they may be. From the get go, Cody describes herself as possessing a geek figure in which she is too pale, is prone to wear a scowl, and believes herself to be at times a little frumpy but you always get the sense that she is comfortable with her body. On a lark one day, she decides to try out for amateur night at a strip club she walked by on a regular basis. From here the book takes all of the detours you expect it to–stories about some of the other strippers, the men who pay for service, the veritable ins and outs of the strip club and its economy and mentality, how it affected her personally and professionally (she still had a “regular” job during the day), and other funny and random thoughts about the profession. Candy Girl is not groundbreaking but the voice of the writer is refreshing enough to make you feel as if you are reading something new. Cody is a neophyte in the stripping world so the book is more about absolute endpoints–I never thought about stripping and then I did it to see what it was like and then that was it–than an oh-how-the-times-have-changed perspective from a veteran of the industry. And, by all appearances, Cody did not delve into this out of irony or with an impulse to expose and shock; it is a memoir in the truest sense, a reporting of events mixed in with opinion and a willingness to subtract judgment on the industry and its participants.

Candy Girl offers some keen observations (women prefer blondes too) and a lot of humor (best songs to strip to and the selection of stripper names, just to name two) about the stripping world and her role in it. But, like Juno, after all is said and done it is the ending that seals the deal. Cody, born Brooke Busey from Lemont, Illinois, uses the last pages to draw out sketches of her childhood and how it is not always girls from broken homes that try the stripping business out. An excerpt from the last chapter, “A Stripper Is Born”:

“Most sex workers… cite a past incident of sexual abuse in trying to explain the illicit path they’ve stumbled upon. I have no such justification. I was never molested as a child, probably because I wasn’t very attractive. Though my mother did her best to outfit me in the preppy armor of the era, I always looked disheveled and owlish. I had obsessive-compulsive disorder and facial tics. My grey eyes shrank behind oversized, Plexiglas-thick spectacles, and my teeth were fenced in by a glittering array of modern orthodontia… I wasn’t a dimpled, curly-haired Campbell Kid ripe for diddling by an older relative. In fact, if I’d been called upon to endorse a product, it probably would have been a set of junior encyclopedias. Or bulk birdseed. Something boring. The point is, my formative years were entirely free of sexual trauma.”

She goes more into her childhood: her parents never divorced, the family owned a successful restaraunt, and they had an education at one of the best private Catholic schools in the area (“My older brother, Marc, and I were coddled to the point of asphyxiation”). Cody writes that her school life was “a fairly typical academic experience for Catholic children in the 1950s; however, this was the eighties” and that maybe those two forces throughout her childhood unconsciously forced an ambition upon her to try weird things before she settled down.

And maybe that is the ultimate point of the book. People change when they enter adulthood regardless of who is around to watch or hang around with them. Some people become drug users or orthodox churchgoers or successful in an under-the-radar sort of way, while others develop serious relationship problems or become rich or are normal, loving parents. It would be unfair to misconstrue this book as being something that paints the stripper atmosphere as something fun and worthwhile. Cody does mention that the money was good at times but it is not being glamorized really in any way. It is a memoir of a girl who went through a brief metamorphosis of experimentation and realized when to get out.

We have all done it in some respect; most of us, however, cannot write about it as concise and as funny as this.

Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

A few years ago I read a book about Poland and when I was done with it all I could think of was one thing: location means everything if a country is to thrive. It goes without saying that I love living in America but I would probably feel very differently about it if I was wedged in between Russia and Germany, or lived in a place that was the stomping grounds for the Huns and Nazis during their reigns of terror and rise to power. America is sandwiched in between Canada and Mexico–two countries with mostly benign histories and a world of differences in terms of climates and topology. Conversely, Poland sits within a crossroads that countries throughout history have looked to annex and/or destroy. One thing I never thought of, though, is this: while America benefitted from its geographical location and Europe was always undergoing a constant upheaval, why did Europe wind up conquering America (both North and South) and not the other way around?

In Guns, Germs, And Steel, Jared Diamond attempts to answer that very question and others: why did Europe and Asia conquer the world and not the other way around? Why didn’t Africa conquer Europe? Why didn’t Australia conquer South America or Asia? Why did Asia, which had such a technological advantage over Europe for so long, eventually falter? One of the first things Diamond points out is that history is typically very racist in its explanations (i.e.-the Europeans conquered the world because the rest of the world were colored savages when they arrived) and it is refreshing to see up front that idea rightfully discredited. We have a tendency to believe, at minimum, in an abstract sense, that the Eurasians were able to conquer the New World with such ease was because the New World inhabitants (Indians, Polynesians, nomadic hunter-gatherers, and the various peoples that splintered from any combination of the three) were simple savages with simple tools and could not fight against the more established navies and armies of Eurasian countries. To be sure, there is some truth to the weapons-deficiency argument but it does not fully explain why only one hundred Europeans were able to overthrow a Peruvian government of many thousands in essentially one day. Were the Europeans that much more awesome in the art of war? Not necessarily. How were they able to conquer countries in which they were completely outnumbered? It is simple: it was because of farming and large domesticated animals.

As Diamond points out throughout the book, the “Fertile Crescent” (shown here with ancient names denoted) allowed the earliest humans the luxury of having the greatest amount of large fertile crops (this area had the largest indigent species of wheat, barley, and sorghum) to be domesticated and the greatest concentration of large animals that could eventually be domesticated. In the entire history of mankind up to this point, we have only been able to domesticate a handful of large animals (cow, ox, horse, goat, etc.) and almost all of them come from this area of the world. What does this have to do with overthrowing foreign societies? Living in areas where you can farm and domesticate animals and, in turn, have your newly domesticated animals do most of the hard labor on your behalf (an ox that can plow a field) means that you will become sedentary, have a family, build a house, and, eventually, select a government to help with the running of your village while also working with and being cognizant of other villages’ needs. Most importantly, too, is that large groups of people living together also become immune to germs that will invariably begin to spread once sedentary areas become more dense. Seen in this context, it becomes very simple to see why nation upon nation of hunter-gatherers and tropical peoples who could care less about politics and working with others to improve upon technical innovations were trampled under foot with relative ease.

Needless to say, this book is a must-read and I could probably write a 12,000 word review about it if left unchecked (I could go on and on about the chapters about how the axes of the continents and climate played a huge hand in stunting growth throughout most of the world but I’ll resist). It is an eye-opening experience to read how succinctly (the book is under five hundred pages yet its scope is thirteen thousand years) Diamond points out of the natural advantages given to the areas within and surrounding the Fertile Crescent area and how this played a huge role in the development of the modern world. My only real complaints about the book are the points in which linguistics is brought up (which is not a lot, but still) and that Diamond over-refers to animal and plant domestication. Regarding the first point, linguistics, to me, is something that is hard for me to identify with; it tended to make me yawn more than normal when reading it. The latter point was more of an annoyance as Diamond repeatedly references domestication even into the later chapters after his point was already adequately made.

All in all, if you are someone who is curious about or enjoys reading about world history and how our humble beginnings as modern humans began this book will most likely be nothing less than brilliant and fascinating. Behind all of Diamond’s desire to teach the reader what he knows by writing this book is a background goal of making academia hip to the point that history can have its own niche as a legitimate science, working in conjunction with archaeologists, anthropologists, and scientists. The scope of this book is huge and, naturally, there are some flaws with such an undertaking but it is ultimately an incredible journey that does not require you to be a professor. This is the kind of the book that could be viewed in the future as genuinely groundbreaking, a smaller scale Origin Of Species of the late twentieth century.

And, like any truly great history book, it reminds you once again that we humans sometimes give ourselves to much credit for our advancements as sometimes it is simply location, location, location that is the key.

’77: Denver, The Broncos, And A Coming Of Age
by Terry Frei

Before John Elway made his way into the hearts and souls of Broncos fans and the citizens of Denver, the Broncos fielded an odd collection of players in 1976 and made a Super Bowl run into 1977 before ultimately falling at the hands of the Dallas Cowboys. Terry Frei, who first broke into sports journalism in 1976 in Denver, chronicles how the team’s unlikely run brought legitimacy to Denver as a sports city and how it inadvertently became a factor in Denver becoming a legitimate U.S. city in general.

Reading the book, it is funny how many players (either the ones who were drafted by the Broncos or traded to Denver) had a reaction similar to “Denver? Isn’t that near Canada or something?” upon hearing where their new NFL home was going to be. Growing up during the same time that Elway came into the league, I have always known Denver to be a legitimate sports city but, apparently, that was not always the case. For the most part, as Frei describes it, Denver (and its surrounding areas) was a part of America that, while it had its share of loyal citizens and beautiful landscapes, basically became blended with Utah and could be at best described as the capital of the Rocky Mountains. To people of the Midwest and the East it was just another mountain city or a poor man’s Seattle. To the people of the West coast it was a great place to go on vacation or possibly move to later on down the line. But the people of Denver (and of Colorado), at least in a sports sense, were pretty rabid in following the Broncos, Air Force, the University of Colorado, and Colorado State. (Though the city had the Nuggets and the short-lived NHL team Rockies, it took a little while for the NBA to catch on and for the city to be granted an MLB team–the second incarnation of the name Rockies–and another NHL team–the Avalanche by way of Quebec.)

In any case, what is ironic about ’77 is that before I read it I thought for sure that I would be fascinated by the storylines that Frei weaved throughout about Denver (mayor McNicholls, governor Lamm, the growing protests from the Latin American community) and the stories about Lyle Alzado. Instead, I found the city storylines to be just mediocre and Alzado’s presence a bit part all while being fascinated instead by the coach Red Miller and the other, lesser role players.

Before the ’76 season began, a number of players (they were coined “The Dirty Dozen” in the press but no one–even to this day–knows exactly how many or who were involved) banded together and got imcumbent coach John Ralston fired. Denver in turn hired Red Miller, a coach who seemed destined to never get higher than an offensive coordinator in the NFL. The story of Miller is one of the greatest things about the book because, let’s be honest, what leagacy has been crafted by the media for Miller? He made only one Super Bowl appearance and the ’70′s in general showcased Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, John Madden, Don Shula, and Bud Grant–all coaches who possessed, albeit in varying degrees, a larger-than-life persona amongst NFL players and the media.

The way that Frei shows Ralston’s coaching lineage and drafting prowess combined with Miller’s innate sense of getting the most out of his players without resorting to grandiose speeches or intimidation is really the reason to buy the book. Ralston and Miller have become forgotten characters within the NFL’s history books and it was a nice surprise (I had no idea who they were) to rediscover who they were. Along the way, Frei introduces the reader to the rest of the team and, for the most part, it is written well and most of the players are compelling. But the nagging feeling I had all throughout the book was that side history and perspective on Denver as a city was ultimately unnecessary but I understand why it was written.

As I read ’77, I kept thinking to myself that that Broncos team kind of unfolded much like the 2006 Chicago Bears did: nice guy Lovie Smith (another coach who could have wound up as a lifer coordinator) takes over a team that finally beats their loathesome rivals (the Packers, just like the Broncos finally unseated the hated Raiders) and winds up going to a Super Bowl fueled by shrewd drafting and smart free agent moves. To me, in thirty years, the story of the ’06 Bears would be a great story to re-read just as I am sure that the ’77 Broncos is great to revisit to those for whom this team held a special place in their hearts.

As a football book, ’77 holds its own but as a sports book that incorporates moments in time outside of the stadium it is only above average. If you lived in Denver (or live there now) this book may be more interesting to you than the average NFL fan. But if you live outside of Colorado you may want to hold off buying this until you find it for under $10 online or something. Ultimately, this book reminded me of the books that Erik Larson has wrote (Thunderstruck and Isaac’s Storm in particular) before and after The Devil In The White City. Devil was so great from front to back because the story was so mesmerizing, whereas the other two books were mediocre because the stories themselves were not very compelling. Frei, like Larson, falls short in making something out of nothing and it is somewhat annoying because I had high hopes for ’77 (just like I did with the two aforementioned Larson books).

Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into A Joke
by Russell L. Peterson

While comedy and politics have always been intertwined, something strange happened in our culture over the last forty years: political humor became more and more pervasive yet the messengers eagerly declared that they held no political allegiance and that, c’mon folks, this is all just a joke anyway (just like our government). You do not have to hold a degree in philosophy to understand the basic foundation that Freud advanced in that jokes have a dual nature: they allow us to say what we really mean and that they act as a release from the internal struggles between our mind wanting to adhere to strict rules and our nature wanting an exemption from time to time and what Peterson writes in Strange Bedfellows is that, yes, jokes are great and true satire can ultimately be a positive societal force, but what exactly are we watching and hearing on a nightly basis? Does it undermine and overly simplify what our government’s role is? By scrapping all elements of true satire in sketches and monologues in favor of character attacks, does late-night humor dumb us down? It may sound irrelevant but like anything else, it says a lot about who we are that The Tonight Show is significantly more popular than The Daily Show or that Stephen Colbert’s routine at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner went over so badly with the people in the room, whereas a Bush impersonator had the room on its knees.

To be sure, stand-up comedy, late-night comedy, and SNL-type skits all bathe in the same swimming pool as the news and pop culture outlets (how else would we get the jokes if the context was absent?) but in gradually following the news’ outlets lead in sacrificing basic journalism for broadcasting character summaries (i.e.–John McCain is a maverick, Barack Obama is hope personified, Hillary Clinton is cold, etc.), late-night comedy too has shied away from its basic principle of digging into its subjects while also informing its audience in favor of character summaries too (i.e.–Bush is a dumb, monkey-looking hick, Gore is stiff and statuesque, Clinton is a horny old man, etc.). It is one thing to say that the media and political spheres are hopelessly broken but quite another to actually formulate thought-provoking satire that points out why it is broken. Peterson points out that politics can polarize large portions of an audience and that is why most shows (starting with Carson) are politically neutral and cling to its inherent “equal opportunity offender” status.

A show like The Daily Show, with its smaller audience size (which Peterson creatively refers to as narrowcasting), is more likely to spend more time pointing out the absurdity of a CNN piece or a Cheney speech than say, Conan O’Brien, who would rather make a couple of light-hearted jabs. While shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Real Time can possess a definite left/liberal slant sometimes it is worth asking if the glaring differences between them and Conan, Dave, and Jay are really political or social. Does the latter group always score higher rating over the former group because the political jokes are more generic?

Throughout the book, Peterson highlights political moments that forever changed the late-night comedy machine, with the Watergate scandal being the primary event and secondary events such as the arrival of Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton marking the new age of the modern finished comic product. Sometimes jokes are simply meant to be jokes–nothing serious, nothing polarizing–but this new era of equal opportunity offending and the character jokes (rather than the substance jokes) have actually done the opposite of their intentions. It is now a political rite of passage for Presidential candidates and Senators to pull up a seat next to Jay and Dave or make an SNL appearance. By distilling political jokes down to nothing more than caricatures we Americans have collectively agreed that we want to humanize our political leaders and candidates by poking fun at them and, at the same time, applaud them for looking “more real” because they can take a joke.

Of course, it is easy to see what the residual side effect of this relationship has brought: political campaigns, the incumbents, and the candidates now go out of their way to say nothing of substance and agree to be entertained by the people who impersonate and mock them. It is kind of a retarded cycle and one that Peterson does a good job of pointing out and expanding on. Strange Bedfellows is a pretty concise read (just over two hundred pages) yet does well to point out a brief history of late-night television (and Civil War era satirical writing), expanding on the “equal opportunity offender” ideal, and providing plenty of examples of the tones of jokes told during monologues. I found this book to be very good but it definitely seems to be missing something yet I don’t know what it is exactly. Maybe it is because the nature of the topic lends itself towards contradictory avenues (mostly, because late-night humor and pop culture and politics are so intertwined it can be hairy to sort out who is the lesser of two evils) but Peterson makes a noble attempt at cracking this subject matter. And it is also hard to disagree with his last point in the book: that the era of information that we now live in makes it much easier for people to only search out the entertainment and political channels that they really want to and, thus, just want to be convinced by their convincers.

Shouldn’t there be a group of people who embrace living on the fray and point out the absurdity of some of this stuff? Don’t we like to see the little guy stick it to the Man? Aren’t we a country that loves, in the name of freedom of speech, to watch comics throw up a middle finger to authority? When Stephen Colbert spoke at the 2006 Correspondents’ Dinner, he made the following jab at the press:

“But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – FICTION!”

It seems kind of sad that no one, during that night, had an “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he said that in a room full of the press”-type reaction. Maybe we have been dumbed down by late-night comedy a little bit.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup
by Susan Orlean

It is probably the goal of many a journalist or writer (or documentary producer) to take seemingly mundane people or events and dig around until something remarkable is discovered. It is probably the most difficult task to accomplish in any media because the end result may, in fact, be boring or mundane. Only a small fraction of writers can truly make ordinary people seem fascinating (and not in a forced or crass way) and Susan Orlean is one of them. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of features and interviews that Orlean had done over the past fifteen years or so for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Outside.

The first piece, written in 1992, “The American Male, Age Ten,” follows a typical ten year-old boy (Colin Duffy) who lives in New Jersey and who loves Street Fighter II, pizza, the thought of being an FBI agent, and the dream to one day live in Wyoming. From there, Orlean introduces the reader to the cult girl group The Shaggs (“Meet The Shaggs,” which, after its initial publication, lured the band out of retirement for a live performance), a group of teenage Hawaiian surfer girls (“The Maui Surfer Girls,” which would ultimately be the basis for the movie Blue Crush), a New York City cabdriver who doubles as the American king of the Ashanti tribe (“A Gentle Reign”), an interesting look at the comings and goings of a hair salon (“Short Cuts”), touring with a Southern gospel band (“Devotion Road”), and an interview with a former Hollywood agent who burned one too many bridges (“After The Party”), just to name a few.

Two of the more fascinating pieces here are “Tiffany” and “Figures In A Mall,” the former about the ’80′s teen singer Tiffany and the latter about where Tonya Harding grew up and her fans. Not only are they interesting simply because enough time has passed and the perspective is different, but they are interesting in the approach taken for writing them. Orlean, having lived in Oregon for a little while, knew that the press was way off in reporting that Harding was from Portland as she was really from an exurb in Clackamas County, which would be almost equivalent to saying that someone from Momence grew up in Chicago. As Orlean adeptly points out, where Harding grew up has more in common with Alaska and rural Oregon than with Portland, Seattle, or even British Columbia. With this knowledge already in hand (and the fact that there was no way she would get the chance to interview Harding), Orlean paints a much more comprehensive picture of Harding’s surroundings and her fans (who, for the most part, were kind of painted like idiots when the Kerrigan scandal broke). As for the piece on Tiffany, you get a pretty vivid portrait of a talented singer whose life is completely controlled by her manager. Her mom and dad are pretty much out of the picture business-wise and the manager calls every shot and even has, per his arrangement, complete control over which labels, businesses, and businesspeople can talk to her. It is certainly odd that nearly twenty years after Tiffany fell off the popularity bandwagon to read that she may have had some sustainability if a different manager were at the helm.

While at The New Yorker, Orlean used to contribute to a column called “Talk Of The Town” which featured small pieces (about a thousand words or so) that featured various people and businesses in New York. One piece, “Nonstop,” is about Peter Benfaremo, the “Lemon Ice King of Corona,” and it is nothing more than quotes of him talking. At no point does Orlean interject any of her thoughts and impressions and just prints his thoughts as she was smart enough to realize that the reader would acquire enough of a picture of Mr. Benfaremo without her assistance. This section of small pieces (called “Short People”) ranges from pieces about a large chair to a woman who owns a button store to the architect of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

All in all, this is a really easy read and one that is highly recommended. To be sure, there are a couple of articles that are kind of badly dated–the pieces about Fab Five Freddy and early-90′s high school basketball phenom Felipe Lopez–but they do not detract from the overall collection one bit. If I were to walk along a beach one day and were to find the proverbial Genie’s lamp and was granted three wishes one of them would probably be that Orlean write one column a week and release one book every year. She has a unique way of describing people and showing the reader a different view of people you may otherwise find nondescript and, because of this, is able to make the world appear as lively, odd, and wonderful as we all imagine it to be when we are honest with ourselves.

The Orchid Thief
by Susan Orlean

I have never bought any orchids nor have I ever attempted to grow any in my spare time. The only time I went to Florida was to go to Disney World when I was in the fifth grade. I have never seen an alligator and I have never walked into a swamp. I am unaware of how many different types of palm trees there are in Florida.

I have only lived on this earth for a mere thirty years and, because of this fact, I have only gotten around to reading only the smallest fraction of available non-fiction books and literature that have been written. I cannot say what will change in regards to my tastes as I get older but as of right now only Anna Karenina ranks higher than the The Orchid Thief on my list of all-time favorite books. For the past three years I have read this book every Spring because, well, it just seems wrong to not start the warm weather season by reading this odd little book about flowers, Florida, and one of the eternal questions of life: what really drives people?. This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read.

That last statement is not hyperbole either because almost every facet of The Orchid Thief is comprised of endlessly interesting facts about orchids (that some can be glued to trees via Liquid Nails and still live), interesting facts about Florida (the land scams of the ’50′s and the number of plants, trees, and animals that have found their way there, just to name two), while also tying in the orchid shows, orchid businessmen, plant crimes, and, of course, Orelan’s own style of writing that blends everything together and creates a book so consuming that you may find yourself (like Orlean) seeing all of those orchid people possessing a passion about something that renders you envious of caring so much about something. What really makes the book exceptional is Orlean’s writing style as she has a way of molding her natural journalistic style with an almost literary point of view. For instance, here is how Orlean describes how orchids may have evolved and what shapes they possess:

“Orchids are considered the most highly evolved flowering plants on earth. They are unusual in form, uncommonly beautiful in color, often powerfully fragrant, intricate in structure, and different from any other family of plants. The reason for their unusualness has always been puzzled over. One guess is that orchids might have evolved in soil that was naturally irradiated by a meteor or mineral deposit, and that the radiation is what mutated them into thousands of amazing forms. Orchids have diverse and unflowerlike looks. One species looks just like a German shepherd dog with its tongue sticking out. One species looks like an onion. One looks like an octopus. One looks like a human nose. One looks like the kind of fancy shoes that a king might wear. One looks like Mickey Mouse. One looks like a monkey. One looks dead.”

In that excerpt, it is posited that orchids may have been irradiated by meteors–which is something that could make for an interesting tangent on its own–but Orlean leaves it by the wayside so that she can expand on the different looks. After all, it is crazier on some level to believe that an orchid looks like Mickey Mouse than the idea that orchids might have been irradiated by meteors.

The rest of the book follows John Laroche (the basis for Orlean’s first article about orchids and the “star” of the novel) and a cast of other orchid enthusiasts and growers, while also inadvertently opening a new perspective on life and death, individuality, conformism, fraud, addiction, and the dynamic and wild frontier that is Florida. This is the kind of book that makes you think and look at life differently, however small or insignificant it may seem at first. Before Orlean enters the Fakahatchee Strand for the first time she almost breaks down in to tears when she entered the ranger’s station before departure. As she wrote afterwards, places that are really scary tend to be decrepit and dead-looking whereas the Fakahatchee is overflowing with life–innumerable amounts of snakes, insects, plants, trees, panthers, alligators, flowers, eels, scorpions, and spiders take up residence there.

I always seem to forge a fondness for books that dispel your preconceived notions and make you look at something in opposite terms. Before I read The Orchid Thief I thought plant and flower enthusiasts were a little off-kilter, that Florida was just a weird little sandbar attached to America, and, on some level, that people driven by odd passions were hopeless slaves to odd whims. To a degree, I still believe a little piece of all three of those statements but after reading about how someone like John Laroche can pick up a hobby (ice age fossils, turtles, etc.) and just drop them arbitrarily and never again revisit them (“Laroche’s passions arrived unannounced and ended explosively, like car bombs”) it made me realize that what drives people to obsession and danger is something that resides in all of us. We may not have grand hopes to clone a ghost orchid or win an award at a huge orchid show in Miami but something drives us to be a little crazy about other things; things that outsiders would view as nonsensical or pointless too. Within the context of this story you could substitute things like “ghost orchid in bloom,” “perfectly red orchid with a white lip,” or “black orchid” with things like “God” or “success” and the end result would be the same: we all aspire to do, find, or create something and the orchids here are simply the metaphor for all of our struggles during our time on earth. And to have Susan Orlean explain it all and point it out makes for an extremely entertaining and fascinating read.