Dino

Nick Tosches' masterly biography of Rat Pack mainstay Dean Martin captures the essence of the entertainer's complex personality, with a combination of imaginative forays into Martin's psyche and a mass of well-researched detail into his Italian immigrant roots and his upbringing in the Mob-run, wide-open town of Steubenville, Ohio. In Tosches' retelling, the Ohio town functions as a microcosm of Martin's eventual Las Vegas milieu, with its rackets, complex political relationships, and general aura of sleaze. Martin is portrayed as a man not so much above all this squalor, but simultaneously of it and yet unaffected by it--in Tosches' view, the entertainer is almost an onlooker in his own existence, unmoved by his own talent or by other peoples' reaction to it. His feigned onstage alcoholism slowly becomes real and takes over his life, and once the Kennedy assassination essentially puts an end to the wisecracking, Martini-fueled good times represented by Sinatra's Rat Pack, Martin's career begins a slow decline. Powerfully written and inventively imagined, in its charting of the rise and fall of an American legend DINO is also a supremely effective analysis of the machinations and corruption of 20th-century American show business. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.