The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

January 1, 2001
One of the New Yorker's most distinctive stylists, Orlean (The Orchid Thief) has a knack for capturing "something extraordinary in ordinariness" of her subjects. Most are completely unknown, or were before she wrote about them in these 20 essays and profiles. Sure, there's a piece on designer Bill Blass and another on figure skater Tanya Harding, but Orlean clearly prefers to write about lesser known people like Felipe Lopez, New York's first Dominican high school basketball phenom, or Kwabena Oppong, a New York taxicab driver who also happens to be the king of the Ashanti living in the United States. (He attends to his Ghanaian subjectsDsettling disputes, presiding over ceremoniesDaround his cab-driving schedule.) Disarming but disciplined, Orlean's style is unobtrusively first person, with deft leads: "If I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale," she writes, opening a story on a prize show dog. While some stories obviously evolve from her lifeDa profile of a smalltown news reporter who inevitably knows everyone, a hairdresser who is a "perfect master of ceremonies"Din others, she ventures far afield: the cult-fave 1960s sister rock band, the Shaggs; teenage Hawaiian surfer girls with offhand fearlessness; a female Spanish matador. (Jan. 26) Forecast: Collections are rarely easy sells, but most of these pieces are gems, and Orleans has become such a staple of the New Yorker that her name together with the stylish jacket image of a woman in bullfighting garb may be a red cape for the magazine's many subscribers. 8-city author tour.

September 1, 2000
The author of the best-selling The Orchid Thief collects profiles she has written over the last 12 years for The New Yorker, Esquire, and more.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2000
Orlean is confident in her ability to "find something extraordinary in the ordinary," but she is also drawn to unusual people. Instinct, luck, and literary know-how shaped her first book, "The Orchid Thief" (1999), qualities that are evident here, too, in this exuberant collection of profiles, most of which were published in the "New Yorker" over the past decade. Orlean's curiosity, faith in improvisation, fundamental respect and fondness for humankind, and ready sense of humor inform each of these well-crafted pieces. She knows how to be present without being intrusive, how to share impressions rather than offer analysis, and how to let her subjects reveal themselves, skills that work especially well with young people. "The American Male, Aged Ten" is a thoroughly charming portrait of a New Jersey boy that perfectly captures Colin Duffy's particular blend of lucidity and goofiness, and Orlean's profile of Felipe Lopez of the South Bronx, the best high-school basketball player in the country in 1993, is similarly warm in tone and agile in structure. In the collection's most bizarre and haunting story, she chronicles the weird phenomena of the Shaggs, a cult-status New Hampshire girl rock group, which consisted of unmusical and browbeaten sisters, forced to perform by their creepy father. Orlean contrasts their gloomy story with a vivid account of a clique of kinetic, fearless, junk-food-devouring Maui surfer girls. She also spends time with a gospel group, a real-estate agent, a clown, a woman bullfighter, Bill Blass, and Kwabena Oppong, king of the African Ashanti and a New York cabbie, pulling up the blinds on one intriguing life after another to extend her readers' knowledge of our dazzlingly diverse world. \plain\f2\fs17 (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)