NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • THE BASIS FOR THE FILM ADAPTATION DIRECTED BY SPIKE JONZE AND STARRING NICOLAS CAGE AND MERYL STREEP The “eccentric, illuminating, [and] hilarious” (New York Daily News ) true story of beauty and obsession in the swamps of Florida and the impassioned individuals who risk everything for the ultimate prize: a rare ghost orchid “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”— Los Angeles Times Meet John Laroche, a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive renegade plant dealer. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole men were arrested with rare ghost orchids— Polyrrhiza lindenii— they had stolen from a wild swamp in South Florida. Laroche had planned to clone the endangered orchids and sell them for a small fortune to impassioned buyers. In The Orchid Thief, acclaimed journalist Susan Orlean follows Laroche through swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida’s orchid collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, fanatics, and smugglers whose obsession with plants is all-consuming. This unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture becomes even more bizarre as Orlean details how the head of a famous Seminole chief came to be displayed in the front window of a local pharmacy, how seven hundred iguanas were smuggled into Florida, and the case of the only known extraterrestrial plant crime. A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is a wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession.

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was murdered in the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, teamed up with education expert Max Eden to find out how the Parkland shooter slipped through the cracks. They argue that the policies pioneered in Broward plague American schools, and make school shootings more likely.