My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere [Hardcover]

Susan Orlean's new book is one more argument in favor of the theory that all writing is travel writing. Most of the pieces in My Kind of Place have appeared in The New Yorker Magazine and others. They cover a wide range of offbeat topics.

Since these articles are all over the map, so to speak, you may end up picking and choosing. Some are very short and personal, others are longer and more journalistic. Some of my favorites were the piece on baby beauty pageants, in which Orlean brings out the rather creepy aspect of such contests very subtly; the taxidermy convention, also a surreal occasion; and a stay in Midland, Texas, a dusty oil town whose claim to fame is being the hometown of George W. Bush.

Orlean's travels outside the States were also good, just not quite as interesting as when she explores the weirdness that exists in our own back yard.

Susan Orlean's third collection of essays includes thirty pieces that were previously published, most of them in The New Yorker, between 1990 and 2003. Orlean explains that the essays she chose for the book are connected in that the sense of place in them is especially important: "When I wrote these pieces, the sense of where I was--of where the stories were unfolding--seemed to saturate every element of the experience, to inform it and shape it, and to be what made the story whole." In some cases the importance of location to an essay will be apparent to the reader, as for example Orlean's piece on the student president of Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan ("Madame President"). But in other cases the reasons for the author's inclusion of an essay are not apparent. Readers, at any rate, are unlikely to care whether the essays are connected to one another by a meaningful theme. Orlean divides her book into three sections: "Here" includes essays set in the United States; those set abroad--from Cuba to Hungary to Thailand--are included in "There"; and "Elsewhere" is a hodgepodge of mostly short (some as brief as two pages), mostly whimsical essays set in any number of places.

Orlean's modus operandi is to observe her subject for a length of time--spending a week or two, say, walking the aisles of an independently owned grocery store in Jackson Heights, New York, interviewing its managers and employees, watching the parade of hair-netted housewives and pierced teenagers and hand truck-pushing delivery men who flow in and out of the store ("All Mixed Up"). And then she writes about the experience in plain prose, and through the accumulation of ostensibly mundane details--sometimes, truth be told, a few too many mundane details--she brings her chosen slice of society alive for readers. Sometimes Orlean is introducing us to unfamiliar terrain, to the resting stations that punctuate a climb up Japan's Mt. Fuji, for example. But Orlean's essays are no less interesting--are indeed often more interesting--when she focuses on the familiar: among my favorite essays in this collection is "We Just Up and Left," the author's description of a trailer park in Portland, Oregon, the sort of place one can drive by for years without noticing.

Other noteworthy pieces in My Kind of Place are "Royalty," detailing the author's investigation into the curious abundance of royally-named papaya stores in Manhattan (Papaya King, Papaya Prince, Papaya Kingdom); "Art for Everybody," a look inside a Thomas Kinkade (the Painter of Light!) Signature Gallery; and "The Congo Sound," an essay about an African music store in Paris, France.

Fans of Orlean's will find more morsels to savor here. Readers who have not read Orlean previously can start here or might, better yet, read the work for which she is best known: her book The Orchid Thief is itself very much about a place--Florida--as well as the orchidophiles who populate it. Just don't expect the book to resemble its fanciful film adaptation, Adaptation, wherein Orlean, played by Meryl Streep, is depicted as a drug-addicted murderess.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

I think Susan Orlean is a very talented writer, but a lot of the essays in tihs book left me wanting. I liked the essays about the social fabric of a particular place (such as her visit to Midland, Texas). Much less interesting to me were her essays about a grocery store, taxidermy convention,and beauty pageant, often in exhausting detail. For example, if you want to know everything about how a small supermarket appeals to a group of diverse customers, then this is the book for you. But I grew weary of her describing the delivery schedule, stocking schedule, customer complaints, managerial challenges, etc. You get the picture. Orleans can be fascinated by any topic, no matter how mundane. I am often described by friends as a very curious person, but even I could not get into a lot of these topics.

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