Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait

Karen Holliday Tanner's Doc Holliday: A Family Portrait has been on my reading list for years now (literally almost six years!), ever since I read the fantastic fictionalized account of his life and times, Doc, much of the background for which the author, Mary Doria Russell, credits Tanner's book.

For better or for worse, Russell has made excellent use of the most interesting bits, such that even six years after reading Doc, Tanner's work felt extraneous. (Which, yes, I recognize is completely backwards, given that hers is the original source material, but there you have it.) The most interesting parts of A Family Portrait are, perhaps not surprisingly, the early bits that really focus on the family portrait. Once Tanner places Doc out west, there's little new; far more in-depth writing exists on Doc's years out west, from his relationship to the Earp brothers to, most notably, the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

As noted in the forward, Tanner "brings fresh insight into the history and culture of the antebellum South, the cataclysm of the War Between the States, and the catastrophe of the Reconstruction period." That is, in writing about Holliday, and particularly the Holliday family, and especially the pre-"War Between the States" Holliday family, Tanner's language is certainly that of an apologist or, as the forward also notes, "Tanner's empathy for her biological subject tends to extend to Doc Holliday's friends and close associates." Certainly, as a Yankee with twenty-first century sensibilities, Tanner's portrayal of Reconstruction goes a bit far, and the extent to which she portrays the family's slaves as happy as loving their masters has a whiff of I-think-thou-doth-protest-too-much, but on the whole, this is still an interesting and highly readable book - particularly the early chapters that deal with Doc's childhood and adolescence.