Mary Doria Russell makes 'Doc' Holliday an enthralling dentist: New in Paperback

on March 30, 2012 at 6:00 AM, updated March 30, 2012 at 11:33 AM

doc.jpgBallantine, 389 pp.; $15

Legend hasn't been kind to John Henry "Doc" Holliday. Infamous for his role in the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, he's usually portrayed as a drunken gambler and stone-hearted killer.

But Lyndhurst novelist Mary Doria Russell recast him impressively in the bestseller Doc as a dedicated dentist by profession, gambler by necessity and gunman more by accident than by choice. He quotes Virgil and converses in French. He's a tender lover and a steadfast friend. He sips bourbon to quell his tubercular cough. And for the summer of 1878 -- when the novel takes place -- "he was allowed a single season of something like happiness."

Russell's characters are so flesh-and-blood they transcend the two-dimensional page. Doc's gentlemanly manners and honeyed drawl are seductive. Kate, his spitfire prostitute lover, is admirable and profane. Wyatt Earp, the laconic lawman, is both puzzled and puzzling to the end, a convincing enigma, even to himself.

I just finished this book, but I'll be thinking about it for a long time, awaiting the planned HBO adaptation, to be directed by Ron Howard.

For reviews of five more noteworthy paperbacks:

Long Drive Home

Will Allison (Free Press, 215 pp.)


Allison studied at Case Western Reserve University. His second novel, after "What You Have Left," chronicles the disintegration of a man's life after an impulsive act of road rage.

White accountant Glen Bauer is enraged when he sees a black teenager careening dangerously fast down his quiet, residential, New Jersey street. Despite his 6-year-old daughter, Sara, being in the backseat, he decides to teach the kid a lesson. He swerves briefly into the other car's path, intending to give a scare. Instead, the teenager's car hits the curb and flips. He is dead.

In her review for The New York Times, Lucinda Rosenfeld questioned the believability of a subplot and the crucial recklessness of Glen's character -- "I didn't entirely buy the conceit that a man so protective of his daughter . . . would risk her safety by pretending to pull out in front of a manically speeding car."

"And yet," she wrote, "what results from Allison's inquiries into one (Every)man's guilty conscience is an engrossing little novel with the nagging yet improbable insistence of an anxious dream."

National Public Radio named "Long Drive Home" one of last year's Top 5 Summer Reads.

The Magnetic North

Sara Wheeler (North Point, 291 pp.)


London-based Wheeler, author of two biographies and three travel books, including "Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica," here visits the other pole, the Arctic.

She traveled through territories belonging to Finland (with her baby son in tow), Russia, the United States, Denmark, Canada and Norway, spending time with reindeer herders, long-haul truckers, environmentalists, oil speculators and hunters. The writer was drawn to a region smack in the middle of climate change.

Wheeler includes much hard data, but there's no shortage of lyricism: "On Saturday the sun was gone and white horses played on the bay. In the shortening days, you felt winter shouldering in: cold air tickled high in the nostrils, and distant vistas shivered in advance of their swaddling snow."

In a new afterword to this edition, she warns, "Since I crawled out of my Arctic Oven tent like a figure at a key stage of evolution, two of the largest three glaciers in Greenland have lost enough ice to fill Lake Erie . . . Much has happened -- but the likely outcome has not changed. I stand by the conclusions I reached in these pages after several years in and around the Arctic. The earth will regulate itself, as it always has. It is we who are at risk. And we are more at risk now than the day this book was first published."

Susan Salter Reynolds, writing in the Los Angeles Times, praised Wheeler's gift as a naturalist, but said Wheeler "really shines in describing the people of these regions, how they live and the issues they face -- relocation, collapsed civilizations, cultures trapped between the past and the present, enormous areas prized only for minerals, the profits of which are not adequately shared with the people who live there."

The Playful Brain

brain.jpgRiverhead, 284 pp.

Richard Restak, M.D., with puzzles by Scott Kim


In this book subtitled "The Surprising Science of How Puzzles Improve Your Mind," neuroscientist Restak and puzzle master Kim team up to explain how puzzles can change, shape and exercise the brain, helping practitioners retain mental sharpness.

They authors focus on three types of puzzles: those that involve memory, perception and cognition. They offer a smorgasbord of example puzzles with explanations of how each presents a unique mental challenge.

Playing with this book can yield some surprises. I work with words as a profession, yet I found I am much better at solving puzzles involving visual thinking than I am at solving word puzzles. (Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised – I consistently lose spectacularly at Scrabble. Yet I continue to play, driven by a morbid fascination with just how bad I am. Maybe a career change is in order?)

In his review for The Plain Dealer, Phillip Manning takes aim at the authors' premise that puzzles "improve your brain power," citing Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's flat-out statement in a New York Times opinion piece that "brain-training games don't make you smarter."

However, Manning concluded that "puzzle fans are unlikely to care. Working clever puzzles is satisfying in itself, even if it doesn't raise their IQs."

History of a Suicide

history.jpgWashington Square, 240 pp.

Jill Bialosky


On the night of April 16, 1990, Kim Bialosky returned to the home in Shaker Heights she shared with her mother, took the keys to her mother's car, went into the garage, closed the door, got into the car, turned the ignition and fell asleep. A neighbor who mowed the lawn found her dead the next morning.

Here, Jill Bialosky, Kim's older sister, tries to make sense of her sister's suicide, 20 years later. She is haunted by the possibility that it could have been prevented.

"Her early death," writes Bialosky in her introduction, "changed every pre-conceived idea I had of suicide, depression, suffering, parenthood, and our debt to another person. Before Kim ended her life, I thought, like most people, that someone who would take his or her own life was somehow different from the rest of us. I was wrong . . . Suicide should never happen to anyone. I want you to know as much as I know. That is the reason I am writing this book."

She delves deeply into her family's history and into her sister's emotional state, addressing biology and genetics as well as depression, substance abuse, fear of abandonment and growing up in a fatherless home.

In his review for The Plain Dealer, Bill Eichenberger calls this "unflinching" and says, "it is Bialosky's frank examination of her family and her own part in Kim's story that make 'History of a Suicide' such a poignant and resonant memoir."

The Fort

Bernard Cornwell (Harper, 449 pp.)


Cornwell's fictional military saga revisits the real-life 1779 Penobscot Expedition, which took place in the eastern province of Massachusetts, in what is now Maine. A group of fewer than 1,000 Scottish infantry established a garrison and naval base at Penobscot Bay. Their fleet consisted of three sloops. In what should have been an easy victory, an American combat fleet sailed from Boston with more than 40 ships and a thousand infantrymen to engage the enemy. They failed miserably.

The battle launched the brilliant military career of Scottish lieutenant John Moore and brought shame and a court-martial upon an artillery commander and Boston silversmith named Paul Revere.

Publishers Weekly called this "a rousing yarn of clashing personalities, crashing cannons, and lively musket and bayonet work, along with spies, cowardice, and moments of incredible bravery. Cornwell presents a fascinating, accurate, and exciting history lesson enlivened with a generous blast of gun smoke and grapeshot."

Donna Marchetti is a critic in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.