Salon.com > Biography

Salon.com > Biography http://www.salon.com Mon, 28 May 2012 00:30:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 “Thomas Hart Benton: A Life”: Great art or populist trash? http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12787901 Artists' reputations rise and fall, but few have gyrated as wildly as that of the painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1930s he was acclaimed as the greatest artist in America, with his face on the cover of Time. Later he was ridiculed as a populist throwback, a stumbling block on the road to abstract expressionism. But recently scholars and curators have given the artist a second look -- and have reread him as a critical component of American art history, not just a crowd-pleaser. This first biography of the painter, by Justin Wolff, continues the Benton revival. And among artists, he needs a biography more than most -- for "Benton's art, as rich and dynamic as it may be, is not as paradoxical as the man was."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/04/thomas_hart_benton_justin_wolff/feed/ 6 “The Queen and the Maid”: Joan of Arc’s secret backer http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_queen_and_the_maid_joan_of_arcs_secret_backer/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_queen_and_the_maid_joan_of_arcs_secret_backer/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12763491 Attention, "Game of Thrones" fans: The most enjoyably sensational aspects of medieval politics -- double-crosses, ambushes, bizarre personal obsessions, lunacy and naked self-interest -- are in abundant evidence in Nancy Goldstone's "The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc." Goldstone's premise, innovative but not outlandishly so, is that Joan's rise from poor, illiterate farmer's daughter to mystical champion of French nationalism during the Hundred Years' War was largely orchestrated by Yolande of Aragon. Yolande, who was the Duchess of Anjou and Countess of Maine as well as the Queen of Aragon (among other titles), was also the mother-in-law of the dauphin, Charles, whose military triumph over the occupying English and coronation in Reims were the two great causes espoused by the saintly, if warlike, Joan. As Goldstone sees it, Yolande's political genius goes under-recognized.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/02/the_queen_and_the_maid_joan_of_arcs_secret_backer/feed/ 7 “Dreaming in French”: Three remarkable women in Paris http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/dreaming_in_french_three_remarkable_women_in_paris/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/dreaming_in_french_three_remarkable_women_in_paris/#comments Mon, 26 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12717651 Jacqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis are three very different American women who shared one similar rite of passage: a year spent in France during their early adulthood. Alice Kaplan's superbly perceptive "Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis" makes a prism out of those visits; the white light of expectation goes in, and a myriad of astonishing colors comes out.

A year abroad is far from a rare experience for American college students these days, but it's a surprisingly undercontemplated custom; Kaplan -- a professor of French at Yale and the author of a memoir and several prize-winning books on French history -- singles out a recently-published academic study by Whitney Walton. However, most attempts to understand the transformative visits of young Americans to other countries have come in the form of coming-of-age memoirs and autobiographical first novels. About Paris, above all, American youth has spun extravagantly romantic fantasies of self-discovery, blossoming cosmopolitanism and creative ferment.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/26/dreaming_in_french_three_remarkable_women_in_paris/feed/ 14 “Island of Vice”: Teddy Roosevelt vs. booze and sex in old New York http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/island_of_vice_teddy_roosevelt_vs_booze_and_sex_in_old_new_york/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/island_of_vice_teddy_roosevelt_vs_booze_and_sex_in_old_new_york/#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12666251 "Sing, heavenly muse, the sad dejection of our poor policemen," read the Homeric opener to a story on the front page of the New York World in 1895. "We have a real Police Commissioner. His name is Theodore Roosevelt. His teeth are big and white; his eyes are small and piercing ... his heart is full of reform." Roosevelt, a few years ahead of his entrance into national politics, had his work cut out for him. New York was, as author Richard Zacks puts it in "Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York," the "vice capital of the United States," with 8,000 saloons and over 30,000 prostitutes.

"Island of Vice" is Zacks' account of Roosevelt's tenure on New York's police commission during the mid-1890s. As such, it faces a dilemma. The hero of the story is, obviously, TR, that quintessential American, with his boundless energy and can-do spirit, his faith in traditional values and the moral use of violence, his omnivorous mind, his machismo and his naivete. The antagonist is sin-loving New York, Roosevelt's hometown but above all the decadent and narcissistic big city that salt-of-the-earth Americans love to hate. Yet the book's main attraction isn't the glimpse it offers of a larval president or the chance to revel in rural/suburban rectitude. Anyone who settles in with "Island of Vice" will be reading it for the vice.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/11/island_of_vice_teddy_roosevelt_vs_booze_and_sex_in_old_new_york/feed/ 5 The enigmatic Putin http://www.salon.com/2012/03/06/the_man_without_a_face_masha_gessen/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/06/the_man_without_a_face_masha_gessen/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12485231 There are those who believe -- and I am one of them -- that Vladimir Putin is the only world leader operating today with a coherent long-term strategic vision for his country. Russian policy has been derided as amoral, wicked and misguided. But for the last 10 years, since the departure of the stroke-addled boozer Boris Yeltsin, Russia has never been called unguided, and its mysterious steersman is unquestionably Putin himself.

Masha Gessen’s political history of Putin’s times,"The Man Without a Face," gives at least a dozen reasons to tremble before her subject. It is a rage-filled indictment of the Russian prime minister, astonishingly brazen in its personal animus and willingness to name Putin as the author of terrible crimes. Among recent profiles of contemporary Russia, there are certainly books that are more sober and more cautious. There are few as furiously accusatory.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/06/the_man_without_a_face_masha_gessen/feed/ 49 The strange, spiritual life of Leo Tolstoy http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/tolstoy_a_russian_life_rosamund_bartlett/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/tolstoy_a_russian_life_rosamund_bartlett/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12231561 There are two principal models for biography in our culture, and perhaps the first decision the biographer has to face is which of the two will best suit the subject in question. First, there is the Boswellian model: the massive tome (or tomes) containing as much material as can be garnered, following the philosophy that the more we know about the great man -- or woman -- the more fully we are able to view him or her in the round. The second model was developed by Lytton Strachey in reaction to what he called the Victorian "Standard Biographies" in "two fat volumes," full of irrelevant detail; Stracheyan biography is slim and sleek, communicated through carefully chosen points and characteristic anecdotes.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/tolstoy_a_russian_life_rosamund_bartlett/feed/ 12 “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind”: Portrait of a genius http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/stephen_hawking_an_unfettered_mind_portrait_of_a_genius/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/stephen_hawking_an_unfettered_mind_portrait_of_a_genius/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11992721 Stephen Hawking is the world's most famous living scientist for two reasons that (despite his own wishes in the matter) are impossible to disentangle. The first is his disability, a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease) that, beginning in his late teens, has rendered him severely disabled. Most people, when diagnosed with ALS, live only a few more years; Hawking has survived for 49, turning 70 on Jan. 8. The second source of renown is his work as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, particularly on the nature of black holes and the origin of the universe.

Even people with no inclination to tackle the brain-bending concepts Hawking outlines in his bestselling 1988 book, "A Brief History of Time," find his personal story inspiring. In that light, scientific preoccupations they might dismiss as arcane and impractical in an able-bodied person become a metaphor for the human ability to transcend limits. As Hawking himself says in the three-part documentary series "Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking" (you can stream it on Netflix), "Although I cannot move, and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/09/stephen_hawking_an_unfettered_mind_portrait_of_a_genius/feed/ 32 The voice of Monday night http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_voice_of_monday_night/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_voice_of_monday_night/#comments Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11870991 For Americans of a certain generation, just the name Howard Cosell instantly summons into memory's ear the brash, nasal yammer of the voice, one that blared from American TVs and radios for three decades, demanding to be recognized, whether it was spinning verbiage around some of sports' heaviest moments -- such as when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and eventually murdered 11 Israeli Olympians in 1972 -- or its lightest ("Battle of the Network Stars," anyone?).

Cosell was the King of Sports, for a time at least, because he asked questions that other people wouldn't and wasn't worried about ruffling feathers. What did concern him, though, was what everybody thought of this tough-talking lawyer out of Brooklyn, N.Y.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/06/the_voice_of_monday_night/feed/ 6 Grant’s last victory http://www.salon.com/2012/01/05/grants_final_victory_charles_bracelen_flood/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/05/grants_final_victory_charles_bracelen_flood/#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11865761 Ulysses S. Grant's life was punctuated by highs and lows. Before the Civil War catapulted him to global fame, Grant had left the army to eke out a living as a store clerk. As the Union's top general, he saved the nation and leveraged this success to win the White House. As a two-term president, Grant was largely a failure; he trusted friends who would betray him and the public, making corrupt bargains behind his back. In "Grant's Final Victory," biographer Charles Bracelen Flood examines the once-mighty general's tumultuous last year, 1884-85, which he sees as a microcosm of Grant's entire life.

The former president thought he'd become rich as a partner in an investment firm founded by his friend Ferdinand Ward, who exploited Grant's name to attract investors. As Flood explains, "Ulysses S. Grant remained naïve about matters of money." In an echo of his presidency (and today's Madoff scandal), Grant's trust was misplaced. Ward, it turned out, was operating a pyramid scheme, absconding with Grant's (and his fellow investors') money. The retired military man was psychologically devastated and financially bankrupted, admitting, "I don't know how I can ever trust any other human being again."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/05/grants_final_victory_charles_bracelen_flood/feed/ 12 The man who chronicled Hitler’s death http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/an_honourable_gentleman_adam_sisman/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/an_honourable_gentleman_adam_sisman/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10367171 Wide-ranging historian, brilliant literary stylist and academic pugilist, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre of Glanton, also wore red socks, rode to hounds, and was a two-bottle man. Claiming to be "an Anglican not a Christian," he was an enthusiastic foe of religion -- Christianity in general, Roman Catholicism in particular, and, above all, Evelyn Waugh and "that old serpent" Fr. Martin D'Arcy. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford and, later, for seven grueling years, Master of Peterhouse at Cambridge. A virtuoso of exuberant vituperation and a connoisseur of mythomanes, fraudsters and forgers, he was famously duped by the bogus Hitler Diaries in 1983, a humiliation that soured the last two decades of his life. One of Adam Sisman's many accomplishments in his excellent biography, "An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper," is to give an account of this unfortunate affair with such finely ratcheted moral precision that the episode could have been conceived by Trollope.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/an_honourable_gentleman_adam_sisman/feed/ 6 Reclaiming Margaret Sanger’s legacy http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/margaret_sanger_jean_baker/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/margaret_sanger_jean_baker/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10293379 Now is a fitting time to reconsider the life of Margaret Sanger. The United Nations marked Oct. 31 as the day the global population reached 7 billion, a milestone greeted with both celebration and consternation around the world. Sanger would have no doubt felt the latter: After World War II, the activist who worked for decades to make contraception legal and available for women in the United States and around the globe condemned "the worldwide congestion of population which cannot continue without worldwide misery, famine, and wars." She was, as historian Jean H. Baker demonstrates in "Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion," tenaciously single-minded, adept at linking any social problem to the need for birth control.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/margaret_sanger_jean_baker/feed/ 19 “Hedy’s Folly”: The movie star behind your cellphone http://www.salon.com/2011/11/28/hedys_folly_the_movie_star_behind_your_cellphone/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/28/hedys_folly_the_movie_star_behind_your_cellphone/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10245009 In the summer of 1940, George Antheil, an avant-garde composer trying to make it in Hollywood, was invited to a dinner party at the request of the most beautiful woman in the world. She, a movie star, wanted to talk to him about her breasts: Did he think they could they be made any larger? She sought out this improbable consultation on the authority of several articles Antheil had written for Esquire magazine applying his supposed knowledge of endocrinology to such questions as whether one's wife had been unfaithful and "which girls will and which girls won't."

Antheil was properly dazzled by the introduction. He later wrote that his "eyeballs sizzled" upon meeting Hedy Lamarr and that she was even better-looking in real life than on film. The question of the actress' breasts seems to have been dropped shortly thereafter, but the two did wind up collaborating on an unlikely project meant to support the Allied war effort: inventing a process by which remote-controlled torpedoes could evade signal-jamming attempts by the enemy. This process, which was patented, is essential to much of the wireless and cellular communications technology we use today.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/28/hedys_folly_the_movie_star_behind_your_cellphone/feed/ 42 Who was Catherine the Great? http://www.salon.com/2011/11/25/catherine_the_great_robert_massie/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/25/catherine_the_great_robert_massie/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10245919 In these days of Occupy Wall Street, when it seems the long-suffering serfs of the Western world are finally rising against the corporate monarchy, it is either dislocating or highly serendipitous to be given the consummate biography of a woman who ruled over earth's largest empire in the 18th century. Catherine the Great commanded unimaginable wealth and power. Her world is both far from ours, an impossible fiction, and right next to it.

She was the daughter of a German prince and an ambitious mother with slender strands of connection to the Russian throne that were reeled in with steely determination. When, in 1744, Sophia Augusta Fredericka was 14, her mother's efforts finally engineered a summons to bring the girl to Russia as a potential bride for Grand Duke Peter Ulrich, the heir of Empress Elizabeth -- that is to say, as an incubator for the next heir. This bizarre fact, from an ever-higher tower of incredible details, is what gives Robert K. Massie's expansive life of Catherine its particular power: it is a "portrait of a woman" rather than "of an empress" because the eminent, Pulitzer-winning historian of Russian royalty ("Peter the Great" and "Nicholas and Alexandra") understands that what is most fascinating is not the story even of passing strange institutions but that of the very human individuals who became captive to them. And so we are offered the full menu of feminine concerns, including but not limited to sexual liaisons (Catherine had 12 lovers, her husband the least of them) and matters of dress (at her wedding she wore a "horribly heavy" crown that gave her a headache but which she was forbidden to remove, and a silver brocade gown encrusted with silver roses; the person inside this tinseled affair was further festooned with sparkling earrings, bracelets, brooches, and rings). She would not have lasted longer than any other female ruler of the empire -- from 1762 until her death in 1796 -- if she had not used both intellect and wiles to make of herself something more than a simple end user, however.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/25/catherine_the_great_robert_massie/feed/ 21 The layman’s guide to Dante http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/the_laymans_guide_to_dante/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/the_laymans_guide_to_dante/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10217933 A. N. Wilson's new book on Dante is inspired partly by love -- he's read Dante over the past 50 years or so -- and partly by the notion that people are scared away from reading Dante at all. As a novelist, popular historian, ex-theology student, former atheist, current believer and amateur Dantean, Wilson offers himself as our Virgil as we journey, again -- or for the first time -- into the poet's imagination. Despite the many books on Dante he's looked at over the years (and his bibliography is deep as well as long), Wilson feels he's never found a satisfactory introduction written for the ordinary non-Italian-speaking reader, "the intelligent general reader of the twenty-first century -- that is to say, you."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/the_laymans_guide_to_dante/feed/ 3 The lunatic cult that history forgot http://www.salon.com/2011/11/11/the_lunatic_cult_that_history_forgot/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/11/the_lunatic_cult_that_history_forgot/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10192154 In February 1919, a small group of middle-class English women received a life-changing revelation. What they learned, Jane Shaw explains in "Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of a Female Messiah and Her Followers" (Yale), was that Mabel Barltrop, a 53-year-old former mental patient living in the town of Bedford, was the incarnation of God. Mabel, whose late husband had been a priest in the Church of England, announced a new Christian theology, in which the Trinity was replaced by a foursome: God the Father and God the Mother, Jesus the Son and Mabel (or, as her followers began to call her, Octavia) the Daughter. She had come to conquer death and was guaranteed never to die. She had healing powers so strong that if she breathed on water or a piece of linen, it was transformed into a cure for any bodily ailment.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/11/the_lunatic_cult_that_history_forgot/feed/ 14 How William F. Buckley Jr. charmed the world http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/buckley_carl_bogus/ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/buckley_carl_bogus/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10159945 Historians rarely have much to say about the role of charm in public affairs. But it matters, and sometimes it matters a lot. William F. Buckley Jr. founded and spent thirty-five years editing National Review, published some fifty-odd books, hosted 1,429 episodes of "Firing Line," and wrote a syndicated newspaper column from 1962 until the day of his death in 2008. Yet anyone who seeks to explain the nature of his contribution to American political life must start by pointing out something else that those who knew Buckley took for granted, which is that he was an irresistibly charming man. Whatever your political beliefs, you couldn't spend five minutes in his company without liking him, or feeling that he liked you (if he did). It was this charm that made him socially palatable at a time when conservatism was widely looked upon by the liberal establishment as one step short of outright bigotry. Moreover, that same charm also made it possible for Buckley to persuade conservatives of all stripes, not a few of whom despised one another, to band together into a movement that is now as central to politics in America as the liberalism that he opposed so passionately and with such flair.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/buckley_carl_bogus/feed/ 24 “Charles Dickens”: The secret life of a literary giant http://www.salon.com/2011/10/30/charles_dickens_the_secret_life_of_a_literary_giant/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/30/charles_dickens_the_secret_life_of_a_literary_giant/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10155622 No writer better mastered the novel's delicate calculus of art and entertainment than Charles Dickens. He was admired by literary grandees and adored by the masses, who famously turned up on American docks to ask the passengers on arriving ships for news of the next serialized installment of "The Old Curiosity Shop." Dostoevsky was honored to meet him while visiting Britain and ordinary people thronged to see his dramatic readings of scenes from his books. "The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters," writes Claire Tomalin in her new biography of the author, but the portrait she paints is of a man who, to his sorrow, did not always know himself.

When Dickens' daughter Katey was in her 80s, she asked a friend to transcribe her memories of her parents, hoping to correct the popular image of her father as "a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch." (It should be said that there were times when Dickens, an enthusiastic entertainer, was very much that gentleman.) "He was not a good man," Katey said, "but he was not a fast man, but he was wonderful!" By the time you get to the end of Tomalin's "Charles Dickens: A Life," when this statement is quoted, Katey's switchbacking sentence seems right on the nose.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/30/charles_dickens_the_secret_life_of_a_literary_giant/feed/ 17 How Harry Belafonte changed America http://www.salon.com/2011/10/29/my_song_harry_belafonte/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/29/my_song_harry_belafonte/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10153339 Celebrity memoirs, of which there are a surfeit these days, tend to follow a predictable pattern: open on a moment of crisis, preferably a near-death experience (the Brush with Death); stumble upon a star turn (the Big Break); and fill the balance of the book with a succession of successes, leavened by a few instructive failures (the Happily Ever After). What brings us back to these books in spite of their predictability is the voyeuristic sensation of glimpsing the private lives of public people.

Harry Belafonte's "My Song" is in many ways just this sort of conventional celebrity memoir. What distinguishes it -- and elevates it to excellence -- is the quality of experience that the book chronicles. Belafonte's Brush with Death isn't an overdose in a suite at the Chateau Marmont, it's a high-speed escape with Sidney Poitier from the Ku Klux Klan to deliver a suitcase filled with tens of thousands of dollars to support civil rights activists in Mississippi. His Big Break isn't a record label intern discovering his demo at the bottom of a box of unsolicited tapes, it's walking onstage for his first gig to find that his backup band consists of jazz immortals Max Roach, Al Haig, Tommy Potter and Charlie Parker. His Happily Ever After isn't a series of Billboard and box office hits, famous paramours and big paychecks (though he enjoys all of these in abundance), it's a lifelong commitment to the cause of civil rights, both at home and abroad.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/29/my_song_harry_belafonte/feed/ 9 The secret family life of Keats http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_keats_brothers_denise_gigante/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_keats_brothers_denise_gigante/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10147086 "The Keats Brothers," by the Stanford University professor Denise Gigante, is an account of the lives of the English Romantic poet John Keats and his brother George -- yet it's also a love story of sorts. In her preface, Gigante advises readers to "prepare for adventure." Although that may sound like overselling, it isn't. Her book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative -- including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more -- offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship.

John was the oldest of four siblings (another died in infancy), but it was his vital bond with George, two years his junior, that sustained him and nurtured the poetic work that began to emerge in his teen years. As Gigante notes, until now George Keats has played a peripheral role in biographies of his famous brother, or he has been portrayed as a cruel, self-absorbed figure who, when John needed him most, abandoned him in pursuit of moneymaking in America. The real story, she writes, has "gone unsung."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_keats_brothers_denise_gigante/feed/ 3 Why did we fall in love with Rin Tin Tin? http://www.salon.com/2011/10/07/rin_tin_tin_the_life_and_the_legend_susan_orlean/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/07/rin_tin_tin_the_life_and_the_legend_susan_orlean/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10104795 "He believed the dog was immortal," Susan Orlean writes at the beginning of "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend." Although the pronoun refers to Lee Duncan, the American soldier who found the German shepherd puppy on a battlefield in France in 1918, the author spends the rest of the book building a case for what became her own powerful belief that the iconic cinema canine, "idea and ideal," will never die.

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