Join 350,000+ subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of
The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Also of interest...in tales from the Wild West
David Crockett: The Lion of the West by Michael Wallis; The Last Gunfight by Jeff Guinn; Doc: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell; The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Despite the song’s assertion, Davy Crockett most likely didn’t “kill him a b’ar when he was only 3,” said Allen Barra in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Michael Wallis’s “splendid biography” gets to the bottom of this and other Crockett myths. We learn that the tracker and marksman had “never heard of the Alamo” before landing in the middle of Texas’s fight for liberty. We also learn that his bravery during that battle earned him his distinction as a true American folk hero.
The Last Gunfight
by Jeff Guinn
(Simon & Schuster, $27)
Sign up for our Culture & Life newsletter
Your weekly digest of stories about entertainment and leisure, delivered every Friday
Jeff Guinn’s riveting account of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral “creates a canvas of the Old West that Frederic Remington would envy,” said Punch Shaw in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. According to Guinn, the legendary gun battle outside Tombstone, Ariz., didn’t even happen in a corral, but in a vacant lot. No matter: Guinn’s evocative portraits of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and his retelling of the “shocking” events that took place before and after the battle keep the pages turning.
Doc: A Novel
by Mary Doria Russell
(Random House, $26)
Mary Doria Russell’s “fantastic new novel” recasts the Doc Holliday of legend as a “rough mixture of fury, gentility, and bourbon,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. Diagnosed with tuberculosis in his 20s, John Henry Holliday spent his short adulthood mixing a commitment to dentistry with a talent for card playing. Throughout the book, Russell “dismantles rickety legends while reconstructing her own larger-than-life characters on a firmer foundation of psychological insight.”
The Sisters Brothers
by Patrick deWitt
(Ecco, $25)
“If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick deWitt’s bloody, darkly funny Western,” said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. DeWitt’s tale centers on the misadventures of Oregon gunslingers Eli and Charlie Sisters, who are hired to kill a California prospector. Narrated by Eli, the story is carried along by the brothers’ quirky encounters—with dead Indians, a possible witch, and a dentist who introduces Eli to the art of brushing one’s teeth.
