Bucking the Tiger

If not the best, certainly the most beautiful novel I've read so far this year, the most poetic and lyrical. Doc Holliday was a tubercular gambler and gunman who ran around with a whore and lived a bloody life on several levels, including in his lungs. That Bruce Olds could take such unpromising material and turn it into a work of art is an act of genius. I don't even like "Westerns"--a friend recommended this book to me--but this is no "Western." It is a poetic meditation on mortality and loss, love and sex, art and violence, and it sings and dances on every page. It's less a story, than a symphony of language, and it works to perfection.

This is one of the most fascinating, beautifully writtten "Westerns" I have ever read. In fact, I'd have to say it is one of the best BOOKS I have ever read. Period. If you know a lot about Doc Holliday, the subject matter alone will interest you. If you know very little, like myself, you will enjoy it not only for what you will learn about history of this character, you will bask in the language, which often reads more like poetry than prose. You don't have to be a Wild West fan to appreciate this novel, you only have to be a lover of serious literature. With this book, Bruce Olds has created a fictional character, rooted in history and based upon fact, that will endure for a long time to come.

Prepare for a tale unlike any other about the life and times of John "Doc" Holliday. At first, the reader may be surprised at the prose Bruce Olds eloquently displays on the pages of Tiger. One becomes entwined in Doc's grand life and death struggle. The words flow beautifully and a tale spun of laughter, love, hatred, melancholy, murder and lust engage the reader. Unlike the formatted Western story, Bruce Olds displays a unique courage and often admits: readers will either hate it or love it. Tiger is like a poetic dance; one must first learn the steps and once that is accomplished, one is fulfilled. An excellent book and Old West Chronicle recommends this book fully, John Savoie, Editor-in-Chief.

In the popular imagination, John Henry Holliday is the fierce dark angel forever at Wyatt Earp's side. In "Bucking the Tiger", Bruce Olds tears away that public persona to reveal Holliday's ardent struggle to burn bright against the darkness. Doc Holliday's proclivities for dealing out death have been greatly exaggerated while his rage to live has gone mostly unnoticed. The reader follows Doc on his life's journey. We see John Henry's hurt and confused rage when, after his mother dies, his father remarries only a few months later. After he learns he is consumptive, we're with Doc as he goes West, takes up gambling and follows the professional circuit from Dallas to Deadwood, from Denver to Dodge City. We meet Wyatt Earp and travel to the dark and bloody town of Tombstone. We experience the gunfight at the O.K. Corral and its violent aftermath. Finally, we are there when Doc Holliday relinquishes his spirit with a quick drink and a wry joke. In covering Doc's story, Bruce Olds gives us more than just another historical novel. In this telling, Big Nose Kate Elder, Doc's inamorata, becomes a sustenance, an oasis of elan within Doc's ever diminishing life-world. When Holliday sojourned west, he didn't extend his life so much as prolong his death. "Bucking the Tiger" is thus a wide ranging reflection on mortality which refracts from Doc Holliday's life and legend back out again onto topics of universal concern. Near the end of the book, Doc writes that he "never intended for his life to resonate." But resonate it does, far beyond Doc Holliday's wildest imagination. Despite the dark subject matter, Olds provides remarkable outbursts of delightful humor. Old timer recollections of Doc are scattered throughout the book and many of these issue from characters in well known movies or TV shows. Steve McQueen's "Josh Randall" is identified as the author of "Fifty Years Spent Strapped to a Mare's-Leg". The "Mare's-Leg" being the odd sawed-off rifle McQueen lugged around on TV's "Wanted Dead or Alive". Few novels of any sort tackle profound questions with the adroitness of "Bucking the Tiger". Bruce Olds' way with the word is nothing short of miraculous. His command of history is nothing less than impressive. After this book, Doc Holliday will live on with the reader forever.

..."Tiger" is not, nor was it intended to be, a "Western," not in any conventional sense of that word. Anyone who (fairly) reads the book will recognize that at once. This is something else--literature (capital "L"), and it is wildly successful. Gorgeously written, deeply felt, brilliantly executed, it excavates the tormented soul of a man who until now has been the public property of myth and legend. The novel imagines an entire, abundantly rich interior life for Doc Holliday, all the long-buried stuff the movies have never dared address because there really is no effective way to film such psychological/emotional states. Not that there isn't plenty of sex and violence along the way, but all that is handled--there is no other word for it--lyrically. ... Oh, and the poetry it contains is ... quite astonishingly beautiful.