If you had a TV in the 1950s, you likely watched The Ed Sullivan Show, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet... and maybe The Lone Ranger, Dragnet and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. New Yorker writer and bestselling author Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief) was just four years old when she first joined her older siblings cross-legged on the floor for the weekly episode of Rin Tin Tin, and she never forgot the brave and smart dog who always came running when Rusty gave that "Yo, Rinty" call.
With a tenacious reporter's curiosity, Orlean digs behind her childhood TV infatuation to find the long and convoluted saga of a show business dog and his trainer--a story that begins with a puppy in the battlefields of World War I and continues with an 11th generation Rin Tin Tin in Claremore, Okla. It is a story of dogs and their human companions, war, Hollywood, fortunes both made and lost and, finally, prolonged courtroom "brand" battles and no-bid eBay auctions of memorabilia.
When Orlean steps back to reflect on the passions and follies of all those touched by Rin Tin Tin, the charismatic German Shepherd who "was born in 1918 and never died," her perspective is much like that of the great dog himself: "worried and pitying and generous... as if he were viewing with charity and resignation the whole enterprise of living and striving and hoping." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kans.