With vast amounts of research and a poetic prose line … Russell has crafted an epic tale … a stunning performance.
Her writing is so vivid it seems she must have been there. … As Russell says, it matters where a tale begins and ends and “who tells the story and why … That makes all the difference.” Russell has made a big difference in bringing this story to life again.
Whatever it is you think you know about the gunfight at the OK Corral, however it is you think you feel about it, forget it all... Mary Doria Russell has 600 pages to burn a fresh understanding into you, and she uses every one of them.
Russell catalogs [the action] with power and beauty and a calculating eye until, as a reader, …understand something primal about the making of famous moments: That the causes are never as simple as you want, and outcomes never as clean or clear.
Well-written and provocative, Doc is a book that will haunt you.
Epitaph peels back all the layers of the events leading up to and following America’s most storied gunfight, in a compelling, richly told narrative with complex characters, sharp context - and a number of parallels to today…a fully realized landscape with nuanced characters.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
An epic retelling of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that sets the 30-second battle within the broader context of the times.
Mary Doria Russell has lifted the participants in the frontier’s most famous gunfight out of the realm of genre fiction and catapulted them into the realm of literature.
03/02/2015 This isn't your great-grandfather's O.K. Corral. Russell (Doc) breathes new life into the well-worn western saga of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday's infamous shoot-out in the Arizona Territory town of Tombstone, largely by using as its entry point the story of Josie Marcus, who escapes her Jewish immigrant family in San Francisco to become a performer. She ends up in Tombstone as the lover of Johnny Behan, sheriff of Cochise County. This brings her to the attention of Wyatt Earp, a deputy marshal who is Behan's rival for political power. Josie loses interest in Behan and falls in love with Wyatt. All things eventually converge with the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral with a gang of cattle rustlers known as the Cow Boys. In the aftermath, Wyatt rides out on a quest for revenge. Although the gunfight itself plays almost as an anti-climax, Russell dramatizes how the bloody events of October 26, 1881, echo through western legend as Wyatt moves on to the Alaskan goldfields, and then to Hollywood in the 1920s to have his biography written. Drawing its title from the name of Tombstone's leading newspaper, this novel does indeed function as the last word for a western sense of justice and vengeance. This novel is a raucously Hogarthian depiction of how the West was truly lived. (Mar.)
A magnificent sequel to Doc that represents a significant advance in her considerable narrative technique… Adroitly shifting points of view throughout, Russell assembles her cast in Tombstone, where her prodigious historical research illuminates the personalities and politics that propelled the combatants toward that corral.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
Despite all that has been written and filmed about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Russell’s pointedly anti-epic anti-romance is so epic and romantic that it whets the reader’s appetite for more.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Well-written and provocative, Doc is a book that will haunt you.” — Historical Novels Review
“Russell shows how the gunfight at the OK Corral is not the end of a hero’s tale but just 30 terrible seconds in a decades-long, nationwide struggle to evolve out of ignorance into enlightenment.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Epitaph peels back all the layers of the events leading up to and following America’s most storied gunfight, in a compelling, richly told narrative with complex characters, sharp context - and a number of parallels to today…a fully realized landscape with nuanced characters.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Russell breathes new life into the well-worn western saga of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday’s infamous shoot-out in the Arizona Territory town of Tombstone… a raucously Hogarthian depiction of how the West was truly lived.” — Publishers Weekly
“With vast amounts of research and a poetic prose line … Russell has crafted an epic tale … a stunning performance.” — Washington Post
Her writing is so vivid it seems she must have been there. … As Russell says, it matters where a tale begins and ends and “who tells the story and why … That makes all the difference.” Russell has made a big difference in bringing this story to life again. — Seattle Times
Russell catalogs [the action] with power and beauty and a calculating eye until, as a reader, …understand something primal about the making of famous moments: That the causes are never as simple as you want, and outcomes never as clean or clear.” — NPR Books
“Mary Doria Russell has lifted the participants in the frontier’s most famous gunfight out of the realm of genre fiction and catapulted them into the realm of literature.” — Dallas Morning News
“An epic retelling of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral that sets the 30-second battle within the broader context of the times.” — Washington Post, Notable fiction books of 2015
“This novel tells the story of Wyatt and Sadie Earp from beginning to end, not stopping at the famous gunfight and its aftermath but following the couple to the end of their lives, inevitably shaped by that 1881 blaze of gunfire in Tombstone, Arizona Territory.” — Seattle Times, Critics Best Books of 2015
“Whatever it is you think you know about the gunfight at the OK Corral, however it is you think you feel about it, forget it all... Mary Doria Russell has 600 pages to burn a fresh understanding into you, and she uses every one of them.” — NPR, Best Books of 2015
★ 01/01/2015 In this follow-up to Doc, Russell is on a mission: she will leave no stone unturned, no seemingly tangential character undeveloped, no political maneuver unexamined in order to chip away at the pristine image of Wyatt Earp, Western Law Man. Unlike Earp's Vendetta Ride, though, her motivation is not vindictive; instead, she uses what must have been a staggering amount of research for something nobler. She wants to reveal truth where it has been obfuscated for more than a century. Exposing consumption's crippling of alleged sharpshooter Doc Holliday, the sterility and addiction suffered by the virtually unknown Earp wife (or rather, "wives"), and even the ineptitude of President Chester Arthur's administration, Russell shows how the gunfight at the OK Corral is not the end of a hero's tale but just 30 terrible seconds in a decades-long, nationwide struggle to evolve out of ignorance into enlightenment. VERDICT The multitude of points of view exemplifies the best of third-person omniscience, revealing innermost secrets, hopes, and fears. Readers of Lyndsay Faye's Gods of Gotham are sure to enjoy this novel, and fans of Westerns ready to branch out beyond Louis L'Amour and Max Brand might see it as a breath of fresh air.—Nicole R. Steeves, Chicago P.L.
A female narrator is a surprisingly suitable choice for this novel about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Although it was Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday who faced the Clantons and McLaurys across that dusty vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, it was their women who were most deeply struck by the tragic consequences of those bullets. Hillary Huber provides a stalwart, gutsy portrayal of Kate Haroney, the brothel madam whose tempestuous relationship with Doc Holliday was scandalous even in the Wild West. Huber gleefully portrays the cunning Josephine Marcus, a scrappy former prostitute who became Earp’s common-law wife. Almost half a century after the gunfight, Huber adds tenderness and a touch of frenzy as Josephine persists in her version of the epic shoot-out. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
A female narrator is a surprisingly suitable choice for this novel about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Although it was Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday who faced the Clantons and McLaurys across that dusty vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, it was their women who were most deeply struck by the tragic consequences of those bullets. Hillary Huber provides a stalwart, gutsy portrayal of Kate Haroney, the brothel madam whose tempestuous relationship with Doc Holliday was scandalous even in the Wild West. Huber gleefully portrays the cunning Josephine Marcus, a scrappy former prostitute who became Earp’s common-law wife. Almost half a century after the gunfight, Huber adds tenderness and a touch of frenzy as Josephine persists in her version of the epic shoot-out. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
★ 2014-11-29 Russell follows up her fictional portrait of Doc Holliday (Doc, 2011) with this fictional deconstruction of the shootout at the O.K. Corral. While Doc Holliday's charisma remains unrivaled, he becomes a kind of Greek chorus when Russell shifts her focus to Wyatt Earp, the ambivalent, morally ambiguous not-quite-hero of this Western Iliad; as Doc says after a gunfight in which Wyatt's boot heel is shot off but he remains unharmed, "Achilles himself would have envied your luck." By 1880, when Doc shows up, the Earp brothers have settled in Tombstone with their "wives"—Russell's strongly drawn women are frontier survivors who take what security they can get whether officially legal or not. Also new in town is 18-year-old Josie Marcus, a nice Jewish runaway from San Francisco who's ended up the "wife" of Republican politician/businessman Johnny Behan. The Irish Yankee is competing with southern Democrat Wyatt Earp for sheriff. Their friendly political rivalry turns ugly once they begin competing for Josie as well. Meanwhile, big business interests behind the silver mines want to rid Tombstone of the local rustlers and petty criminals threatening the town's reputation and the capitalists' financial futures. The novel shifts effortlessly between intimate focus—for instance, Doc quietly teaching Josie a piano piece; actually, every scene with Doc or Josie is a bull's eye—and a wide angle that captures President James Garfield's assassination as well as the history of silver mining. The volatile mix of money, politics and personal vengeance intensifies in the months leading to the famous shootout and its less famous but brutal aftermath during which Wyatt loses his moral center. Eventually the novel becomes less violent but sadder and more realistic as Wyatt turns into a sullied victor on an odyssey toward Josie and pop-culture immortality. Despite all that has been written and filmed about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Russell's pointedly anti-epic anti-romance is so epic and romantic that it whets the reader's appetite for more.