Rin Tin Tin or Rin-Tin-Tin was a male German Shepherd born in Flirey, France, who became an international star in motion pictures. He was rescued from a World War I battlefield by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, who nicknamed him "Rinty." Duncan trained Rin Tin Tin and obtained silent film work for the dog. Rin Tin Tin was an immediate box-office success and went on to appear in 27 Hollywood films, gaining worldwide fame. Along with the earlier canine film star Strongheart, Rin Tin Tin was responsible for greatly increasing the popularity of German Shepherd dogs as family pets. The immense profitability of his films contributed to the success of Warner Bros. studios and helped advance the career of Darryl F. Zanuck from screenwriter to producer and studio executive.
Adaptation is a 2002 American meta comedy-drama film directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. It features an ensemble cast including Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper, with Cara Seymour, Brian Cox, Tilda Swinton, Ron Livingston, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in supporting roles.
Joan Didion was an American writer. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
The Orchid Thief is a 1998 non-fiction book by American journalist Susan Orlean, based on her investigation of the 1994 arrest of horticulturist John Laroche and a group of Seminoles in south Florida for poaching rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve.
Lee William Aaker was an American child actor, producer, carpenter, and ski instructor known for his appearance as Rusty of "B-Company" in the 1950s television program The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin. He was the final surviving cast member of the series. In 1952, Lee Aaker appeared in Desperate Search with Howard Keel and Keenan Wynn.
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012). She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Mary Emily Foy was the first woman head librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, appointed to the job in 1880 at the age of 18. She had graduated the year before from Los Angeles High School. She served for only four years but left a legacy for Los Angeles librarians to remember.
Flirey is a commune in the Meurthe-et-Moselle department in north-eastern France.
Joan Silber is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.
Orchidelirium, also called orchidomania or orchid fever, is the name given to the Victorian era of flower madness when collecting and discovering orchids reached extraordinarily high levels. Wealthy orchid fanatics of the 19th century sent explorers and collectors to almost every part of the world in search of new varieties of orchids. Orchidelirium is seen as similar to Dutch tulip mania. Today there still exists some levels of orchid madness, that has some times resulted in theft of exceptional orchids among collectors such as the Ghost Orchid.
Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend is a book by Susan Orlean published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster. It is a non-fiction account of Rin Tin Tin. Blogcritics praised the depth of the book and wrote that "It was fascinating to read about the 16 million animals deployed in World War I as scouts, messengers, carriers of medical supplies, and sentries. The insertion of the author’s personal reflections detracted from the more compelling story, but is a minor flaw in an otherwise extraordinary book." Alaska Dispatch put it in its "20 new nonfiction reads for fall", calling it "a must-read book that is both an excellent piece of cultural history and a remarkable story of the animal-human bond."
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People is a collection of essays by Susan Orlean published in 2001 by Random House. It was her first book after her 1998 work The Orchid Thief.
Eve Babitz was an American visual artist and author best known for her semi-fictionalized memoirs and her relationship to the cultural milieu of Los Angeles.
Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Susan Lipper is an American photographer, based in New York City. Her books include Grapevine (1994), for which she is best known, Trip (2000) and Domesticated Land (2018). Lipper has said that all of her work is "subjective documentary"; the critic Gerry Badger has said many describe it as "ominous".
Rose Tarlow is an interior designer, furniture and textile designer, and author based in Los Angeles, California. She is known for having designed elegant residences for a small number of notable clients. She is the author of Private House, a memoir of her interior design activities, first published in 2001.
The Library Book is a 2018 non-fiction book by Susan Orlean about the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. It received strongly favorable reviews and became a New York Times Best Seller.
