Orchid Fever (Methuen non-fiction)

Enjoyed the pace and tempo of this fascinating book. Well worth the read if you have an interest in orchids and horticulture, and can be as obsessional as the rest!

Hansen is so good; read everything he's written because he's quite simply one of the best travel writers ever. I'm not even that interested in orchids but like everything else, he made the subject witty, fascinating and excellent. Read his Borneo book too as that's a great read for anyone.

A beatifully written book, the authors style is open and airy making it very easy to read. The beginning of the book is superb and memorable but the latter half bogged down with too much orchid politics. I was hoping for more accounts of wild collecting in the jungles of the world than bickering over office desks and the end of the book simply wilted to no conclusion at all. But if you are an orchid fancier, its a must have.

a very good book

Enjoyable read

Whether you happen to be an orchid lover, or merely a curious bystander, "Orchid Fever (A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy)" will have you by turns helpless with mirth and seething with indignation, or else simply agog with incredulity from start to finish. For it is, quite simply, an absolutely stunning piece of investigative journalism, dressed up as a tale of personal obsession and eccentricities. Written using plain language and with an outstanding witticism, it makes for compelling reading throughout, whether or not you know anything about orchids, or the orchid-growing and trading communities that it explores.Chapter by chapter, alternating hilarious episodes with the downright unsettling or just plain unbelievable, Eric Hansen gradually lays bare the seedy underbelly of a world that perhaps few of us realise exists. He reveals an alarming world-wide conspiracy, fuelled by greed, protected and upheld by idiotic international bureaucracy and a network of power politics, which daily threaten innocent lives and legitimate livelihoods as well as vast swathes of natural fauna that they purport to be protecting.Populated as it is by gentle, likeable heroes, blackguardly villains, utter buffoons and the most outrageously bizarre of characters, it is sometimes easy to forget that this book is factual, so far-fetched are some of the events and scenarios that its author recounts. And yet, this somehow makes the book all the more scary, for occasionally things happen to make you realise that it is not a work of fiction. And at that point, the anger sets in... anger that things should be this way and are likely to remain so, despite the best efforts of some of the book's obvious heroes.Thoroughly researched over a period of some seven years and never less than fascinating, this book exposes the full and terrifying consequences for anyone who succumbs to orchid fever. It is an essential read for anyone who thinks that orchids are nothing more than beautiful but harmless flowering plants. Or indeed for anyone who has never heard of fox testicle ice-cream!