Reviewed by Linda Morefield

Dogs are everywhere, not only in parks and on walkways. They are in our language. We are dog tired, long for the dog days of summer, call each other “dawg” (if you are of my son’s generation). We say “that dog won’t hunt” or “I don’t have a dog in that fight.”

I live in Alexandria, Virginia, where there are dog bakeries, dog specialty stores and even a school for dogs. There is dog happy hour at a local hotel that features a cash bar for humans, and water bowls and dog biscuits free to canines. The local bank invites dogs inside. Their tellers hand out dog biscuits.

Dogs are on the radio and in magazines and newspapers. In a two-week snapshot of time, I heard a radio sportscaster state (regarding Michael Vick) that people are more sensitive to dogs than to other people. The New York Times magazine had a photo essay on the search-and-rescue dogs of 9/11: “Privately owned dogs were mobilized, with their owners, to search for victims of the 9/11 attacks. They are now retired.” The dogs, uniformly, have huge white muzzles and eyes that look like they are still seeing horrors.  Another NYT inside headline read: “By Helping a Girl Testify at a Rape Trial, a Dog Ignites a Legal Debate.” And why? “Defense lawyers fear jurors might be swayed by a cute animal, even if a witness lies.”

I am so accustomed to dogs that I no longer pay particular attention to their presence, except for my neighbor’s dog, who barks all night, and my own dog, who goes on play dates with his doggy friends. That’s right, play dates. I never thought about how odd this might sound, living in a dog-centric city, until I read Susan Orlean’s extraordinary Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, which is much more than the fascinating history of how a real puppy in 1918 evolved from waif to movie star to television star to national phenomenon, with an existence independent of the original Rin Tin Tin.

This book is a tale of obsessions, a cultural history of the United States, a study of the role of dogs in our wars, homes and hearts, and a biography of a man, his dog and a legend. We also get glimpses of the author and what drove her 10 years of researching and writing this book.

Susan Orlean is a master of obsession. From the personal, she extrapolates changing cultural mores and the unchanging needs and desires in what Jung called our collective unconscious. Her previous book The Orchid Thief, the story of John Laroche and other horticultural obsessives, expands from individual lives to the hypothetical why of their needful quest. She writes that “collecting can be a sort of love sickness. … the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It made the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.”

Rin Tin Tin is also the story of “how we make sense of the strangeness and solitude of existence.” It begins with Lee Duncan, survivor of many abandonments and betrayals.  His father disappeared when he was five. A year later, his mother left him in an orphanage for three years. Then he lived on a ranch with his grandparents, who killed his pet lamb. His mother eventually reclaimed him, but did not allow him to take his dog, stating that his beloved pet would rejoin him soon. He never saw that dog again.

As a young soldier in the Meuse Valley, Lee finds amid the slaughter in a bombed-out kennel “a frantic German shepherd female with a litter of five puppies,” one of whom was to become the original Rin Tin Tin, named after a popular good luck charm. From the battlefields of France to the extraordinary effort and luck it took to bring home to the United States both Rinty (as Lee called him) and Nanette, Rinty’s sister, Lee was fiercely determined never to be separated from these dogs. Never again would something he loved be taken from him. And it is this personal need that melded into a universal longing that “something that you truly love will never die.” Rin Tin Tin, different dogs through generations of dogs “… had beaten time.”

But Rin Tin Tin is more than a story of a man and his dog, and more than Orlean’s well-told tales of other men and a woman, orphans all of one type or another, who follow their own dog obsessions. It is more than the author describing her grandfather’s untouchable Rin Tin Tin toy and its impact on her. This book is a cultural history of the United States as reflected in our evolving media, and an American emotional history as reflected in our changing attitudes toward canines.

In 1911, America, with one movie studio, was on the verge of a new industry. By 1919 more than 80 percent of the world’s movies came from Hollywood. Rinty became a star of the silents, an embodiment of our emotional needs, a dog “steadfast and loyal, [who] accepts being unjustly accused, and ultimately forgives his master. The dog embodied a rich, mythic sort of heroism, an empathy that is broader and deeper and more pure than what an ordinary human would be capable of.” And as Orlean points out, at this time dogs were still regarded as field animals. With people migrating from the country into cities, movies about animals were a reminder of a different time.

And so came the transformation of Rinty from real dog into heroic ideal, a character always tested.  He “embodied many of the questions and conflicts and challenges that came with being alive.”

Whereas the silent dog could project these virtues on the screen, the talkies reduced  Rinty’s stature. He now accompanied heroes, a brave dog, but a dog. He was fired from the studio, and eventually went on the vaudeville circuit, where Lee told stories and Rinty, a screen legend, revealed himself as a dog trained to perform tricks.

By the 1930s, people began bringing dogs into their homes. Before this time, “the idea of a dog being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of.” That anyone, not just a professional, could train his dog, was a novel concept that quickly caught on. Between 1947 and 1953, the number of dogs in the United States jumped from 17 to 22 million; “the dog population was growing four times as fast as the human one.” Dogs were now living with us, many as family members.

Lassie became the new canine idol. Collies replaced German shepherds as movie stars.  Families were looking for comfort rather than steely heroics. And “Lassie inspired love rather than awe.”

With the advent of television in the 1950s, the American public could watch “Lassie,” the story of a fatherless boy with his dog, or “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin,” the story of two orphans, a boy and his dog, set back in time on the American frontier. Rinty was now a companion dog rather than a super-hero.

On May 17, 1963, Orlean writes, “everything changed for German shepherds.” Newspapers carried front-page pictures of German shepherds snarling and lunging at civil-rights protesters. The author quotes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as stating that “these photographs ‘did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary … but possible.’ ”

And here is my coda to Orlean’s brilliant and exciting book.

May 2011: Cairo, most probably a German shepherd, was part of the Navy Seals team that stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound.

May 6, 2011: President Obama shook hands with members of the team. Before he could meet Cairo, the Secret Service insisted that the dog be muzzled.

Linda Morefield is a Virginia writer. Her nonfiction narrative about Montoya, a felonious canine, will be published in The Potomac Review in spring 2012.