(Simon & Schuster, $27)
Rin Tin Tin’s rise to fame is a story worthy of its own Hollywood script, said Linda Holmes in NPR.org. As told by Susan Orlean, it began on a World War I battlefield in France, when an American corporal stumbled upon a litter of German shepherd pups in the wreckage of an abandoned German encampment. Lee Duncan made two of the dogs his own pets, though only the one he called Rin Tin Tin survived. Given that he had spent part of his boyhood in an orphanage, “it wasn’t a coincidence that Duncan was the one to rescue the pup who had no one.” But what happened next to the lucky canine certainly couldn’t have been predicted.
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Orlean “goes to enormous lengths to sniff out every aspect of Rin Tin Tin’s tale,” said Heller McAlpin in CSMonitor.com. The author of The Orchid Thief is “drawn to eccentrics,” and she found one in the late Lee Duncan, who bonded with his Rintys in a way he never managed to do with humans. But Orlean tries too hard to make Rin Tin Tin’s story “a symbolic vessel” for many other truths about America, said David Peisner in TheDaily.com. Orlean mixes in personal anecdotes and pocket histories of dogs in the military, but she lacks a central subject who can anchor her explorations. “What we’re left with is mostly a series of fascinating, loosely connected, often beautifully written digressions.”