What our lives are really like

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Elizabeth Strout is a first rate writer, and I should have liked this more than I did. She has a fine ability to zero in on the subtleties of what's wrong with people. But I don't know...I think that what's really wrong with people is that witches keep telling them they can be king if they'll only murder a bunch of people, or that they've killed their father and married their mother, or even that their balls have been shot off and their girlfriend is having it on with a bullfighter. Those ring a bell with all of us, right?
I kept wanting this book, and these people, to mean more to me.

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Brave, courageous and bold...

Doc by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Got better and better as it went along. I ended up loving it. Probably about 85 percent real history, presented as a novel, but a sort of metafiction, with the author stepping beyond the fourth wall to talk to about the characters and their place in history,

I've written a novel -- Tempest of Tombstone -- about these characters -- the Earps, Kate Elder, Doc Holliday -- in Tombstone, and I did a lot of research for that -- nothing like the incredible research Russell has done -- but I knew very little about the Dodge City years.

Se gets so much right about the Old West, pointing out that a sheriff or deputy in Dodge City was essentially a small town policeman, breaking up fights between drunks, getting raccoons out from under buildings, answering calls to domestic disputes. Very little in the way of Gunsmoke - type gunplay. I also get so df NRA types - and anti-NRA types -- talking about the good (or bad, depending on your point of view) old days of Wyatt Earp and the Wild West where everyone carried guns and weren't afraid to use them. Wyatt Earp was the original gun control advocate, which is the reason why the Earps' reputations were destroyed by the gunfight at the OK Corral, even though they won it.

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