Assignment 6 There seems to be no holding back in Susan Orlean’s, A Millionaires Hot House. The chapter is about John Laroche and Orlean’s experience going to Florida to witness his court date and to find out more about him. Laroche is a man who has lived all over and currently presides in Naples, Florida as a flower expert, and flower nursery owner. He is a very intelligent man who goes through phases of obsession in his life that have included tropical fish, ice age fossils, turtles, and orchids. His obsessions, though, do not fade, they are there one day and inexplicably gone the next. Currently his obsession is with flowers but mainly orchids. During the time of the chapter, Laroche had been arrested for stealing endangered orchids …show more content…
from a Florida state preserve. A millionaires Hot House, shows a side to everything that neglects moderation. Everything is done to the fullest or not at all, especially in the case of Laroche. After learning about John Laroche and his life from Orlean, one thing is apparent; Laroche lives his life in excess. He has gone through multiple obsessions that have dominated his life during their peak. When his obsession was with turtles believed that “his life wasn’t worth living unless he could collect one of every single turtle species known to mankind, including one of those sofa-sized tortoises from the Galapagos.” When his obsession was with fish at one point “he had more than sixty fish tanks in his house.” It does not stop with his obsessions; he has an excess of optimism that includes him having a positive outlook when he spilled pesticides into a cut that led to having “permanent heart and liver damage.” He thought that it was actually “all for the best because he was able to sell an article about the experience.” It is not only that he has an obsession one day then “out of the blue” “[vow] he would never again collect” whatever he had been obsessed with. It went so far as him swearing off the ocean after his fish obsession, and “[living] his whole life only a couple of feet west of the Atlantic, but he has not dipped a toe in it since then.” Even when it came to mutating orchids, he mutated everything he could in all the different he could think of. It is these crazy things that take him from being a person that avoids moderation to a person that does everything to the fullest. Extremism also shows up in Orlean and her decision to pick up and go to Naples, Florida just to find out more about Laroche.
She doesn’t call, she doesn’t mail, she doesn’t email; she just picks up and goes to Florida to attend his court date. She demonstrates the same lack of moderation that Laroche does just in more specific things. Orlean describes Florida in such detail; she describes how it is a place of extremes. She describes how “The wild part of Florida is really wild. The tame part is really tame.” She makes it abundantly clear that just like Laroche’s obsessions, the wild “reclaims a piece of developed Florida every day,” while “the wilderness disappears before your eyes.” There is a seemingly internal struggle for power between wild and man made in Florida, but there is no middle ground. It is either one of the other there is no moderation. John Laroche symbolizes the idea of excess without any moderation, but Orlean makes sure that it is in all facets of the book. The way she describes Florida it obviously draws parallels to Laroche and the way he lives his life. Even Orlean represents the idea of doing everything to the fullest or not at all, in the way she travels to Florida on hunch that there is a good story. Everything in A Millionaire’s Hot House exemplifies the idea of throwing moderation into the wind and doing everything in excess, especially the protagonist John
Laroche.
To many families the prospect of owning land was the central driving force that brought them to the land known today as the wild Wild West. Much propaganda wa...
...vel FAHRENHEIT 451, the main character is influenced by many different sources. Bradbury writes of a fire fighter that has realized that the society he lives in isn’t right and makes the protagonist want to make a change. Guy Montag is influenced by a teenage girl that makes him realize the beauty’s of the world. Guy is also influenced by a fire that burns a woman alive. Montag steals a book from that fire and that is the beginning of when he begins his mission to find out why his society has become the way it is, and his greater mission of changing society so that everyone in it can think for themselves. Captain Beatty is one of the greatest influences in Guy’s life because of his knowledge, the information of Clarisse’s death and when guy is forced to murder the fire captain. Making Montag’s greatest influences, Clarisse, the fire on Elm Street and Captain Beatty.
The setting of the essay is Los Angeles in the 1800’s during the Wild West era, and the protagonist of the story is the brave Don Antonio. One example of LA’s Wild West portrayal is that LA has “soft, rolling, treeless hills and valleys, between which the Los Angeles River now takes its shilly-shallying course seaward, were forest slopes and meadows, with lakes great and small. This abundance of trees, with shining waters playing among them, added to the limitless bloom of the plains and the splendor of the snow-topped mountains, must have made the whole region indeed a paradise” (Jackson 2). In the 1800’s, LA is not the same developed city as today. LA is an undeveloped land with impressive scenery that provides Wild West imagery. One characteristic of the Wild West is the sheer commotion and imagery of this is provided on “the first breaking out of hostilities between California and the United States, Don Antonio took command of a company of Los Angeles volunteers to repel the intruders” (15). This sheer commotion is one of methods of Wild West imagery Jackson
When he notices the extravagant living style of Van Tassel’s family, his “mouth water[s]”(5) and “he picture[s] to himself every roasting pig running about with an apple in his mouth.” His desires grew to marry Katrina because the person who marries her will “inherit these domains.” and thought “with the idea how they [may] readily [turn] into cash” and buy “shingle palaces in the wilderness.” The greed for money drove Ichabod, a skinny guy against Brom Bones “the hero of the country”(6).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Willoughby’s writing is that so much change has occurred in the past hundred years. His setting, though the very Everglades we travel through today, is an Everglades where saw grass was ten feet tall, and trails were no where to be found. His Florida, though located exactly where he left it, now has too many hotels, tourists, and residents to count. The change that has taken place in Florida was one that Willoughby foreshadowed, and one that we would not be able to fully comprehend without the writings of people like Willoughby. He captured the moment on paper for the future to see and gave us a means of comparison. He wrote about change in Florida over the course of a year since his previous visit. He mentioned that a big hotel and bustling tourists destroyed the picturesque and that Florida’s “wilderness has been rudely marred by the hand of civilization” (62). I wonder what he would say today. The mere two thousand individuals he wrote about was a number no where near to the number of people who have since marred Florida. Like Willoughby, I regret change. An...
... middle of paper ... ... This conflict conveys the confrontation of wild American nature with the new-coming European civilization, people like the young hunter?had no qualms about doing harm to nature by thrusting civilization upon it? P. Miller, p. 207.
Elisa life in the “closed pot” of the Salinas Valley is not one that she wants, but it is one that she cannot escape. Without the encouragement of a man, she cannot find the strength to look beyond her life of gardening and household chores. Until she does, she will remain trapped in role as a house-wife.
She seems to care only for her family’s future. She ignores the bad news on the radio, even when it is irrevocably telling her of the radiation sickness in
Maintaining ecological diversity is necessary for the survival of a biological community. In the United States, American citizens are on the verge of irrevocably damaging one of the country's most unique and diverse treasures - the Florida Everglades. This national park is now the only remaining patch of a river that used to span 120 miles from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay. Dikes and levees created by the Army Corps of Engineers in the late 1940's drained this river to reduce flooding and increase useable water for the development of the region. This major diversion of water lead to a trickle down effect causing the continual decline of the environmental state of the Everglades. Since then, debates over the Everglades' future have silently raged on for years about how, why, and when the restoration will begin. This ongoing, but virtually unproductive effort has cost taxpayers a great deal without any apparent benefits. Recently, this debate has been amplified by the voices of the sugar industry in Florida, which was attacked for its major contribution to pollution of the Everglades. Now debates rage on with a new effort called the Restudy. Backed by the Army Corps of Engineers, this effort would change the flow of the Everglades, potentially restoring it into the viable community of life that it used to be. The question now is, will this latest attempt to restore the Everglades ever be realized (thus ending the cyclic Everglades debate) or will it simply add up to one more notch on the bedpost of inadequate and failed attempts to save this national treasure. The world is watching to see how the United States will handle this unprecedented cleanup.
He is trapped inside a world where they do not have any hardships, they have no real meaning in life. John observes that the citizens lives are not expensive enough stating that “nothing costs enough here,” (Huxley 239). When John says this he is stating that the people's life have no value. They do not live for anything. Not for love, not for nobility, not for sorrow, nothing.
Obsessions can lead one to greater heights, but it can also leech off of him until only a shadow remains. That’s the message writer Susan Orlean conveys to readers in the first chapter of her award winning novel The Orchid Thief. This surprising real life account by Orlean takes place at the simultaneously rural and urban state of Florida. When Orlean hears of a horticulturalist’s, John Laroche, trial for having stolen a rare species of orchids from a local state park, she immediately researches deeper into the subject in case “this ball of paper might bloom”, eventually leading her to Laroche himself. Laroche, the reader soon discovers, has a consistent habit of emerging himself in fleeting passions that disappear as suddenly as they emerge. From turtles, to coral fish, to orchids, Laroche’s interests remain as unpredictable as his perseverance is unfaltering. Once Laroche decides he’s interested in a new field, he gives his soul for the occupation, spending every
Over the years, the idea of the western frontier of American history has been unjustly and falsely romanticized by the movie, novel, and television industries. People now believe the west to have been populated by gun-slinging cowboys wearing ten gallon hats who rode off on capricious, idealistic adventures. Not only is this perception of the west far from the truth, but no mention of the atrocities of Indian massacre, avarice, and ill-advised, often deceptive, government programs is even present in the average citizen’s understanding of the frontier. This misunderstanding of the west is epitomized by the statement, “Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was as real as the myth of the west. The development of the west was, in fact, A Century of Dishonor.” The frontier thesis, which Turner proposed in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, viewed the frontier as the sole preserver of the American psyche of democracy and republicanism by compelling Americans to conquer and to settle new areas. This thesis gives a somewhat quixotic explanation of expansion, as opposed to Helen Hunt Jackson’s book, A Century of Dishonor, which truly portrays the settlement of the west as a pattern of cruelty and conceit. Thus, the frontier thesis, offered first in The Significance of the Frontier in American History, is, in fact, false, like the myth of the west. Many historians, however, have attempted to debunk the mythology of the west. Specifically, these historians have refuted the common beliefs that cattle ranging was accepted as legal by the government, that the said business was profitable, that cattle herders were completely independent from any outside influence, and that anyone could become a cattle herder.
Western movies such as Rio Bravo and El Dorado illustrate America’s rugged and picturesque scenery explaining life as it was in the wide open country, at a time when few laws were in place to safeguard the public. These two films tell the story of four men who arrest and
of the book. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007. 695-696. Print. The.
Susan Orleans novel “Orchard Fever” adapted into the movie “Adaptations” can be viewed and analyzed as an example of Hollywood’s take of turning a novel into a film using cinematic devices to let the audience see a visual depiction of what they may have read. In the film “Adaptations” most of what viewers read in the novel “Orchid Fever” are told in a similar way, however, the film uses additional tools to recreate events and moments found in the novel. Orleans’ written texts give details of what occurred and what she had known from John Laroche about his pursue of orchids and his expertise in the subject. It can be noted that the film “Adaptations” uses content from the novel and employs further elements such as character behaviours, emotions, and motives, along with use of environments and camera techniques to integrate the written text. Events such as the day John Laroche’s was charged for trespassing at Fakahatchee or Laroche explaining his knowledge of orchid relations with