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Doc
Mary Doria Russell
#UE6962 Hardcover, 394 pages; 2011 $20.80

  Doc Holliday earned his notoriety alongside Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral, yet little is known about the gun-slinging dentist who was immortalized in penny dreadfuls and Hollywood films. Now this insightful novel offers up a compelling look at the man behind the myth. Born to wealthy planters in antebellum Georgia, well educated, and musically gifted, John Henry Holliday seemed destined for a life of ease and privilege. But illness and the Civil War propelled the young man west into the virtually lawless American frontier, where his genteel manners and medical know-how stood in stark contrast to his reputation as a bourbon-swilling gambler. In these pages we meet the prostitute he loved and the mother he adored, as well as the friends and enemies he made in a notorious Kansas cattle town called Dodge. The Earp brothers and Bat Masterson play pivotal roles in Holliday's story, yet Doc is no shoot-'em-up Western. Rather it is an introspective and engaging study of a man whose short life helped to define the American West. (KG)