<p><b>A <i>New York Times Book Review </i>Editors'' Choice One of <i>Esquire</i>''s 125 best books about Hollywood</b><br><b><br>Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her.</b><br><br>¿Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,¿ Robert Gottlieb writes in <i>Garbo</i>, ¿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, transcendent presence she possessed¿was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe¿s. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, un