"Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941," Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, "Greta Garbo is in people?s minds, hearts, and dreams." Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world?s subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six, only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world?and that indescribable,...