In 1993 Eric Hansen led an expedition through the steaming jungles of Borneo to find the world's rarest orchid. Five years later he was still on the trail of the true story behind one of the world's strangest plants and humanity's oddest obsessions. From the Orinoco River to the hothouses of Kew, and the clandestine nurseries of Europe to the peat bogs of northern Minnesota, this is a tale of orchid smugglers, ice-cream makers and visionary breeders; of corruption, murder and moths with twelve-inch tongues; and of the vicious, bizarre world of international plant politics, and the wide range of gentle people whose overriding passion in life is the cultivation of these beautiful, fragile flowers. Funny, weird, poignant and completely unputdownable, ORCHID FEVER is an exhilarating, provocative journey to the heart of orchidaceous darkness.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'A wonderful book. I was up all night reading it, laughing and crying out in horror and clucking at the vivid images of bureaucracy with the bit in its teeth...ORCHID FEVER is a bitterly funny, lubricious, lunatic journey in the unsettling company of the orchid world's most outrageous screwballs, some so bizarre and irrational they seem to have fallen among us from a flying saucer.' - Annie Proulx, author of THE SHIPPING NEWS
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Verlagsort
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 223 mm
Breite: 144 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-413-74740-2 (9780413747402)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Eric Hansen, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, has travelled extensively in Asia and the Middle East. He has worked as a fisherman, a wild dog hunter, and a barber in Mother Teresa's centre in Calcutta. He was once shipwrecked for two weeks on an uninhabited Red Sea island and has been imprisoned in Israel, the Yemen and Afghanistan for travelling without permission. He now lives in San Francisco.
