3.5 stars, rounding up to 4. This wanders off the subject on a fairly frequent basis, but the subject itself is fascinating - people so obsessed with orchids that they'll steal and smuggle in search of ownership. Now I'm a botanist myself, so I like plants more than the average person, but this... there's enjoyment and then there's monomania, and ecologies being stripped of their organisms for sale is hard to stomach.

The thief of the title is a genuinely interesting character, but as the book goes on it becomes increasingly clear that he's less one individual obsessive than he is a representative of an entire subculture... and part of me thinks "Well, good for them following their passion", but there's another part that thinks passion has been confused with greed, perhaps, or selfishness. The tension caused by trying to preserve collectible species in increasingly reduced environments is very soon apparent, and the debate as to whether or not that's better achieved by collection and cloning is particularly relevant. I wish there'd been a greater focus on it, instead of Orlean's wandering off into the history of real estate scams in Florida, for instance, but despite the wanderings this is still a compelling book.