As soon as I learned from Susan Orlean's website that

a) she, the author of The Orchid Thief, wrote this book of essays ("My Encounters With Extraordinary People") and

b) it contained the essay that was the inspiration for my favorite summer movie of 2002, Blue Crush,

I ordered a used paperback copy online. As soon as it came in the mail, I read "The Maui Surfer Girls," fell asleep, woke up, and read "The Maui Surfer Girls" again. I'm not sure if it's the best essay in the book, because I like it too damn much to compare it objectively to the others.

The Maui surfer girls love one another's hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits.

I met Lilia and Theresa at Ko'ki Beach at eight, after they'd had a short session on the waves. When I arrived they were standing under a monkeypod tree beside a stack of backpacks. Both of them were soaking wet, and I realized then that a surfer is always in one of two conditions: wet or about to be wet. Also, they are almost always dressed in something that can go directly into the water: halter tops, board shorts, bikini tops, jeans.

No one comes here for ordinary reasons in ordinary ways . . . They live in salvaged boxcars or huts or sagging shacks just to be near the waves.

My feelings about the other essays are mixed. I do like Orlean's attention to details of a place and the people that inhabit it. But many essays feel like they are missing something big and unifying, or ramble too long without a clear direction. The essay nominally about Tonya Harding, "Figures in a Mall," is not actually very much about Tonya. It's really about Clackamas County, where she grew up and lived when she was training, and the scenes Orlean describes are only tangentially related: the Tonya Harding fan club, the pentecostal church service led by a friend of Harding's bodyguard Shawn Eckardt. The little vignettes are vivid, but disjointed, like much of the essays in the book.