by JeffGuinn (Author)
The genius of this book is that, for all its historical accuracy and sophistication, it still tells a story as stirring as any western. The Sunday Times A book I've been reading with enormous pleasure. Simon Hoggart, The Guardian On the afternoon of 26 October 1881, in a vacant lot in Tombstone, Arizona, a confrontation between eight armed men erupted in a deadly shootout. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral shaped how future generations came to view the old West. Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons became the stuff of legends, but the truth is even better. As The Last Gunfight makes clear, the real story of the O.K. Corral and the West is far different from what we've been led to believe by countless Westerns. Drawing on new material from private collections, including diaries, letters, and Wyatt Earp's own hand-drawn sketch of the shootout's conclusion, as well as documentary research in Tombstone and Arizona archives and dozens of interviews, Jeff Guinn gives us a startlingly different and far more fascinating picture of what the West was like.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Edition: First Thus
Publisher: The Robson Press
Published: 10 Oct 2012
ISBN 10: 184954364X
ISBN 13: 9781849543644
-- Library Journal Express (Starred Review)
-- The Wall Street Journal
--Dale L. Walker, Dallas Morning News
Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
-- Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
--David Martindale, Star-Telegram (Fort Worth, TX)
The Last Gunfight
Jeff Guinn gives us not only the clashing egos and the mythic gunslingers, but also the larger social forces that converged on a roistering mining town in southeastern Arizona that fateful day in 1881. The result is a kind of anti-Western: The cliches are stripped away, the black hats removed, the 'rugged individualists' unmasked, leaving us with real human beings who are swayed and shaped by the forces of history, and trapped in time.
--Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder
--Lynn R. Bailey, Tombstone historian and author of Too Tough to Die
--Clive Cussler
-- Kirkus Reviews