Doc Holliday

Rating:
Summary: BOOK OF ITS TIME
Review:

When John Myers Myers wrote this book not much was publicly available and/or known about Doc. Hence, his book, like Pat Jahns, was more about the place and time than the man. Jahns at least admitted it in her title with (FRONTIER WORLD OF ETC.). Both wrote 98% about the World of Doc and 2% about Doc from necessity. Myers is better in his Tombstone Last Chance book and did some creditable research. Jahns was the first to find Doc's family and interview members and also find Frank Waters Unpublished Ms. on Aunt Allie Earp in the Arizona Historical Society. (Of course she had no way of knowing that was half spurious.) John Myers Myers, however, had a great feel for the time and place and understood "Gunfigher Psychology."

Good read in any case. It should be in the "Compleat Western Buff's Bookshelf." Product of its times.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Myers biography
Review: I love John Myers Myers, and his writing style, but I understand how many people can be turned off by it.

First of all, this is not so such a biography of Doc Holliday as Myers WRITING a biography about Holliday. What I mean by this is that Myers is a VERY self-indulgent writer. He loves to play around with words, include quick humorous phrases on a whim, and make self-referencial comments throughout any book he writes, which includes this one.

His research tends to be strong, and he tends to take rather radical views of his topics, views which challenge what is normally held as the truth about his subjects. (His book on the San Francisco vigilante committee days completely deflates the idea that the vigilantes stood for anything other than their own personal vendettas and profits.)

This book is pretty tame by Myers conventions, but is still a bit indulgent. It's a good read, but do expect to have to re-read pages, get side-tracked by witty comments, and indulge in wordplay. That's the Myers way!

Rating:
Summary: A '50's look at an enduring outlaw legend.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: My Review of "Doc Holliday" by John Myers
Review: The author did his research and obtained his information from
good sources to be sure. He writes like Shakespeare. His vast
expanse of vocabulary for the time frame of Doc as well as a
lot of verbage from the time period is spectacular. His book
takes off where Ms. Karen Tanner's book leaves off. While they
both compliment each other, there are some glaring differences.
Mr. Myers book is "down to earth" and I would rate it a six if
one more point where allowed.

Rating:
Summary: Buy Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend
Review: While this book does contain some facts, all of those facts and more are set out much more clearly, intelligently and properly researched in The Life Behind the Legend. Myers takes some historical information, a lot of creative thinking, mixes it with some general western myths and serves up "Doc Holliday". Some is entertaining, but it left me wanting a real read, especially after having read other better documented information on Doc's life. While his bibliography is long he failed to dig into the historical documents of the era and reiterates a lot of myths that have been exploded by 2002.