True Grit, by Charles Portis (author), Donna Tartt (narrator)

Recorded Books, ISBN 9781449892289, June 2006 (original publication 1968)

Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old from a prosperous Arkansas family in in the 1870s, would in other circumstances be an insufferable brat. Right now, though, she's a young woman on a mission: her father has been shot and killed by a transient worker of dubious background that Frank Ross had hired to work on their farm. The killer, Tom Chaney, has fled across the border into Choctaw territory, and Mattie is determined to get him. To that end, she has found the "meanest" Federal Marshall, Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn, and offered him a hundred dollars to help her track down Chaney.

Cogburn is initially reluctant to bring a young girl with him into Indian Territory, and when Mattie has worn him down, a Texas Ranger LeBoeff, following Chaney, whom he knows as Chelmsford, for killings in Texas, reiterates the very sensible idea that Mattie should go home and let them track the fugitive.

That's not happening.

Mattie is almost as tough and smart as she thinks she is, and she, Cogburn, and LeBoeff learn not to underestimate each other.

Mattie is telling this story from her childhood many years later, an aging spinster bank owner who has even yet never seen any reason to compromise her standards or her beliefs. She can be naive, judgmental, narrow-minded, but she is always utterly sincere. Donna Tartt's reading is pitch-perfect.

Recommended.

Doc: A Novel, by Mary Doria Russell--Review

Random House, ISBN 9781400068043, May 2011

This novel is a rather different look at the life of John Henry "Doc" Holliday, famous (or infamous) friend and ally of the famous (or infamous) Earp brothers. The shootout at the OK Corral is epilogue, not centerpiece. After telling the tale of Holliday's upbringing in Georgia and his education as a dentist on the recommendation of his doctor uncle, who felt that medicine was becoming the realm of quackery while dentistry was becoming ever more scientific, the book focuses on what is presented as his one happy summer as an adult: the summer he met the Earp brothers in Dodge City, Kansas.

The new-minted dentist John Henry Holliday begins a promising young practice in Atlanta, but before too long comes to the painful realization that he's suffering from the same consumption (tuberculosis) that killed his mother. His uncle, Doctor Holliday, recommends that he move to the hot, dry southwest, and helps him locate a practice to join in Texas. All is well for a few, brief months--and then the Panic of 1873 happens. The dental practice can barely support its owner, and Holliday is out of a job. He gradually starts to support himself by gambling, and after a few years of sinking deeper and deeper into this life, he meets Kate Haroney, a smart, educated, former minor aristocrat who lost her entire family and position and is now supporting herself as a whore.

This is a partnership that will last, off and on, for the next decade, and it's also what brings Doc Holliday to Dodge City, where he meets the Earp brothers. And this is the meat of the story that Russell is telling, the story of the summer when Doc thought consumption might be loosening its grip on him, starts up a dental practice again, and forges a friendship with the Earp brothers, especially Morgan and Wyatt. It's the summer when Morgan and Wyatt get a painful education in politics, and the summer that another figure who will someday be famous, Bat Masterson, is also in Dodge and starting to fabricate the stories that will be the cornerstone of his fame. Russell gets us convincingly inside these heads, especially Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and builds a compelling account of how and why they made the choices that led them to that fateful thirty seconds in the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. We also see the beginning of Bat Masterson's myth-making about them, especially Doc Holliday, and the great distance between reality and myth in the story of Holliday's career as gambler and gunslinger.

One of the most touching strands in this story is Holliday's commitment to the positive good that professional dentistry can make in people's lives, freeing them from pain, even while it's clear to him that he'll never support himself with dentistry. In fact, it's his gambling that enables him to support his dentistry. Another, almost equally touching thread is Wyatt's rehabilitation of the horse Dick Naylor.

While there are gunfights and brawls in Doc, this is not a story of western gunslinging derring-do. This is a thoughtful and compelling look at some major icons of the American west, before they were famous and when they never expected that a gunfight would become the central event of their lives.

Highly recommended.

I received a free galley of this book for review from the publisher.