Book: Mary Doria Russell 'Doc' (2011)

This is a beautiful book. I've been a Russell fan since her extraordinary novel The Sparrow (and a Doc Holliday fan since Tombstone), and I am awed by the graceful manner of her writing about one of the great legends of the Old West. Perhaps the most striking feature of this story is that it is not a western. Yes, it holds cowboys, gunfights, gamblers, swinging saloon doors,  horses, hookers, and dust and death in Dodge within its pages - all the proper elements of all the best western tales - and yet the author maintains a certain level of class in her literary perspective, refusing to glorify or glamourise events that are traditionally written up as the most thrilling of adventures. Her sympathetic though far from saintly portrayal of the life and times of John Henry Holliday, D.D.S., feels very little like a grand heroic adventure tale and very much like a sad story about a sick man, far from home and surrounded by strangers who barely even speak the same language he does. Somehow she manages to make that story feel poignant rather than maudlin,  imparting a startling atmosphere of realism to a story about someone who is usually relegated to the larger-than-life pantheon of gritty  hardboiled American Heroes.