Doc Holliday

by John Myers Myers

Book Overview

"John Myers Myers has written Doc's story with a skill that matches the sureness of a bullet from Doc's gun."-Dallas Times Herald. "As for the general reader, he'll eat this up and beg for more."-San Francisco Chronicle.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803257813
• ISBN13: 9780803257818
• Release Date: August 1973
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

good work

a real effort has been made to separate fact from fiction. This is uncommon where histories tend to be factionalized. A good read.

Auspicious Match of Author and Subject

Doc Holliday is my favorite of all the colorful characters who became legends of the old West, and John Myers Myers is my favorite historian of that great epic of American history. I believe that this book is the best of the many volumes that Myers wrote on the history of the West. Myers brings just the right voice to the story - an idiosyncratic style of telling a tale full of colorful idioms and turns of phrase that perfectly match a history full of people with monikers like Doc, Big Nose Kate, and Curly Bill. Myers was a great folk historian. While he did solid research on his subjects, he realized that the legends that grew up around certain characters had as much historical importance as the facts of their life. Often when writing histories of the West, verifiable facts are few, and legends are plentiful. This was certainly the case when Myers wrote `Doc Holiday'. Yet he was able to use what was known to weave a fascinating tale that rings true. History, after all, is more art form than science, and Myer's "Doc Holiday' should survive more academic efforts that have missed this point in a quixotic quest for "just the facts, ma'am". Doc Holliday, both by the circumstances of his time and place, and apparently by his own design, left a scant official record of his passing among us, but he blazed a wide trail in the legend that he left behind. Myers did a fine job of ferreting out the former, and a masterful job of portraying the later. He captured the spirit of the man and the times and wild place in which he lived and moved. This is a book worthy of the legend, and I recommend it highly. Theo Logos

I read this book twice, that means a lot

The book will probabably be not 100% accurate at all, but it is still a nice try. A pitty Holliday didn't write something himself. A very good book anyhow, a must read for Tombstone-Earp-Holliday-fans !!!

Engaging book by a wonderful stylist

Doc Holliday is one of those characters seen out of the corner of history's eye, about whom all manner of nonsense has been written. This is a lovely little book of engaging discourse by an author whose conversational style is an absolute delight to read. I expect to be sub-specializing in this author just for the pleasure of listening to him write.

A '50's look at an enduring outlaw legend.

I've been on a '50's book binge lately; I'm not sure why. Part of it is that I've been in the mood to read about bad boys, and no recent decade was so friendly to really bad boys as the '50's. In that kind of mood, you might want to bone up on your outlaw history, and who better to fill your bad boy yearnings than the gentleman outlaw, John Henry (Doc) Holliday? John Myers Myers wrote Doc Holliday in 1955, and it remains the most even-handed, insightful and just plain enjoyable book about Doc you're likely to read. Part of the fun is gleaning elusive tidbits of the real Holliday's personality - reading, for example, a Denver reporter's description of Doc's poker face: "He gambled with a moo-cow innocence which led other players into believing he could be pushed around...." Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Holliday's killings totaled somewhere in the vicinity of 18 to 35 men, depending on who did the counting, a tally you might argue takes him a little beyond the bad boy category. No matter. The complexity of Holliday's personality still makes for a great read. Kevin Jarre had to have included Myers on his reading list as he researched his script for Tombstone. Doc Holliday explores the strangely compelling personality behind an enduring legend, leaving us with an epitaph written by the man who knew Holliday best: "Doc was," wrote Wyatt Earp, "a dentist whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long, lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skilful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun I ever knew." Yeah.