Doc+by+Mari+Doria+Russell+(non-fiction)+-January+11,+2012

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Link to a gallery of pictures featuring book characters.

We will meet Wednesday, January 11th, in the library after school to discuss __Doc__. If you would like a copy loaded to your kindle please see me. We also have copies behind the circulation desk if you would like to check it out.

Gus Chan, The Plain Dealer **Mary Doria Russell**, with her dachshund, Annie, in the study of her South Euclid home. Reacting to the news that HBO will make a series out of her new novel "Doc," she said, "How cool is that?" Mary Doria Russell has had to keep a juicy, wonderful secret to herself since June. This week, it at last became official: HBO plans to make her latest novel, "Doc," into a series, with Ron Howard directing the pilot and Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of "A Beautiful Mind," heading the project as executive producer. "How cool is that?" said Russell, still giddy with the news. "I could not ask for a classier team, that's for sure." "Doc," published by Random House in May to critical acclaim, takes a fresh look at John Henry "Doc" Holliday, long mythologized as a ruthless gunslinger, gambler and drunk. Russell's research turned up a far different man: Her Doc is a courtly Southern gentleman -- emphasis on the "gentle" -- who was more comfortable slinging dental tools than guns. Holliday came from a fine Georgia family; Margaret Mitchell, a relative, is said to have used him as a model for Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind." He played piano, quoted Latin and Greek poets and philosophers, and went to the finest dental school in the country. He most likely would have lived and died in obscurity but for one thing: He had tuberculosis. At 22, he went West for the climate, a journey that led him to the Earp brothers, Tombstone, Ariz., and, eventually, the O.K. Corral. As pleased as Russell is with the deal, she has enough experience with Hollywood to know not to get too excited. For one thing, she said, "Writers are like krill in that eco-system. They're the whales, and we're the nourishment; they just eat us." She is certain she will not be consulted on anything. "I am now 'source material,' " she said. "They have bought the rights to my characters and story, but they could take the story in an entirely different direction." The South Euclid author is a battle-scarred veteran of the Hollywood game. Antonio Banderas -- then a major star -- optioned her first novel, "The Sparrow," with Universal Studios, planning to star in the film. "It went through three years of development hell there, and then they decided not to go further with it." Then Brad Pitt fell in love with "The Sparrow" and got Warner Bros. to option it for him. Another three years went by. "Same thing," Russell said. "They wrote a screenplay, and it never was produced. " Russell herself wrote a screen adaptation, with screenwriter Karen Hall, and is still hoping to see "The Sparrow" hit the big screen. "Many are optioned, few are produced," she said. "So I'm being careful this time to keep my adrenaline under control." Meanwhile, she is writing "The Cure for Anger," the sequel to "Doc." Random House, publisher of all five of her novels, declined the sequel, but it was picked up by the Harper Collins imprint Ecco. "Harper Collins did not know about the deal with HBO when they picked it up," she said. "I'm grateful." **Questions to Consider As You Read:** 1. Doc Holliday spent nearly all of his 36 years struggling with a series of life-threatening medical conditions. How do you think this affected his personality and the ways that others saw him? 2. Young Dr. Holliday arrived in Texas just as the Crash of 1873 wrecked the nation’s economy. What parallels did you see to our own times? Do you know young people whose plans have been similarly derailed by the Great Recession? 3. How did your feelings about Kate Harony change as the novel went on? Was her relationship with Doc dysfunctional, or do you think they were “a comfort and a support” to one another? What about Mattie and Wyatt? Bessie and James? Alice and Bob Wright? 4. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday are often portrayed as best friends, but Russell places Morgan Earp at the center of the novel’s relationships. Why do you think that so many movies and books overlook Morgan? 5. John Henry Holliday was a skilled and gentle dentist, an accomplished pianist, a loyal friend, and an educated man who was often generous, and habitually courteous. He was also easily offended, quickly angry, a heavy drinker, a spendthrift, and a sarcastic snob. Do you think you would have disliked him in real life? 6. The novel touches on many legal and moral issues that are still debated today (prostitution, gambling, abortion, drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, etc.). Did your opinions about regulation, legalization or prohibition of such behaviors become more nuanced as you read? 7. In the South, “a gentleman is judged by the way he treats his inferiors.” Whom did John Henry Holliday consider his inferiors? Do you think that changed when he went West? What’s the difference between courtesy and respect? What role does race play in the novel? 8. Nearly all the women in the novel were prostitutes at some point in their lives. Doc says that’s because “some man failed them.” Do you believe that? What alternatives did women have in the 1870s? When did that begin to change? 9. Everyone in Dodge has come from someplace else. Given the realities of the frontier, would you have gone West, or would you have tried to stay in the East in the 1870s? 10. Margaret Mitchell said that the character Melanie in //Gone With The Wind// was based on John Henry Holliday’s childhood sweetheart Martha Anne Holliday, who later became the Catholic Sister of Charity, Sister Mary Melanie. She never mentioned Doc directly, but which character(s) do you think might have been based on John Henry Holliday?

Doc: A Novel by Maria Doria Russell - An exerpt.
He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle. The disease took fifteen years to hollow out his lungs so completely they could no longer keep him alive. In all that time, he was allowed a single season of something like happiness. When he arrived in Dodge City in 1878, Dr. John Henry Holliday was a frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who wanted nothing grander than to practice his profession in a prosperous Kansas cow town. Hope – cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box – smiled on him gently all that summer. While he lived in Dodge, the quiet life he yearned for seemed to lie within his grasp. At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earp’s side to avenge the murder of Wyatt’s brother Morgan. The journalists of his day embellished slim fact with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed, and always dressed in black, as though for his own funeral.) That unwanted notoriety added misery to John Henry’s final months, when illness and exile had made him a lonely and destitute alcoholic, dying by awful inches and living off charity in a Colorado hotel. The wonder is how long and how well he fought that destiny. He was meant to die at birth. The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise. His mother’s name was Alice Jane. She was one of the South Carolina McKeys, third of eleven children. Fair-haired, gray-eyed, with a gentle manner, she came late to marriage, almost twenty at her wedding. Alice was pretty enough and played piano well, but she was educated in excess of a lady’s requirements. She was also possessed of a quiet, stubborn strength of character that had discouraged beaux less determined than Henry Holliday, a Georgia planter ten years her senior. Alice and Henry buried their firstborn, a sweet little girl who lived just long enough to gaze and smile and laugh, and break her parents’ hearts. Still in mourning for her daughter, Alice took no chances when she was brought to bed with her second child. This time, she insisted, she would be attended by Henry’s brother, a respected physician with modern ideas, who rode to Griffin from nearby Fayetteville as soon as he received her summons. Labor in Georgia’s wet mid-August heat was grueling. When at last Alice was delivered of a son, the entire household fell quiet with relief. Just moments later, a dreadful cry went up once more, for cleft palates and cleft lips are shocking malformations. The newborn’s parents were in despair. Another small grave in the red Georgia clay. But Dr. John Stiles Holliday was strangely calm. “This need not be fatal,” the physician mused aloud, examining his tiny nephew. “If you can keep him alive for a month or two, Alice, I believe the defects can be repaired.” Later that day, he taught his sister-in-law how to feed her son: with an eyedropper and with great care, so that the baby would not choke. It was a slow process, exhausting for the mother and the son. John Henry would fall asleep before Alice could feed him so much as a shot glass of milk; soon hunger would reawaken him, and since his mother trusted no one else with her fragile child’s life, neither slept more than an hour or two between feedings, for eight long weeks. By October, the infant had gained enough weight and strength for his uncle to attempt the surgery. In this, John Stiles Holliday was joined by Dr. Crawford Long, who had begun developing the use of ether as an anesthetic just a few years earlier. After much study and planning, the two physicians performed the first surgical repair of a cleft palate on the North American continent, though their achievement was kept quiet to protect the family’s good name. With his mother’s devoted care, the two-month-old came through his operation well. The scar in his upper lip would give his smile a crooked charm all his life, but his palate remained unavoidably misshapen and when the toddler began to talk, Alice was the only one who understood a thing he said. Truth be told, everybody else suspected the boy was a half-wit, but Alice was certain her son was as bright as a new penny, and mothers always know. So she shielded John Henry from his father’s embarrassment and shame. She forbade the house slaves and John Henry’s many young cousins to poke fun at his honking attempts at speech. She studied Plutarch on the education of children, and with Demosthenes as her guide, Alice Jane set out to improve her child’s diction. All on her own, she analyzed how the tongue and lips should be placed to produce the sounds her little boy found impossible. She filled scrapbooks with pictures and drawings, and every afternoon she and John Henry paged through those albums, naming each neatly labeled object, practicing the difficult words. In that way, Alice taught her son to read by the age of four and though correction of his speech required years more, their diligence was rewarded. In adulthood, if his difficulty with certain consonants was noticed at all, acquaintances were apt to ascribe it to his lazy Georgia drawl. Or, later on, to drink. He was quiet and rather shy as a child. Hoping to counter his natural reserve, Alice started John Henry’s piano lessons as soon as he could reach the keyboard, and she was delighted to discover that he had inherited from her an accurate musical ear and a drive to master any skill to which he set his hand. Left to himself, the boy would have whiled away his hours reading, or practicing piano, or daydreaming. Alice knew that was no way for a Southern gentleman to behave so when John Henry turned seven, she began to encourage the other Holliday boys to spend more time with him. It wasn’t long before he held his own in their rowdy, noisy games, riding as recklessly and shooting as well as any of them. “He ain’t big and he ain’t strong,” nine-year-old Robert Holliday told his Aunt Alice, “but that boy’s got a by-God streak of fight in him.” And he was going to need it. When she was confident at last that John Henry would not be ridiculed for his speech, Alice enrolled him in a nearby boys’ academy. She had taught him well at home; from the start, he excelled in mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, and history. Latin and French came easily. Greek was a struggle but with characteristic determination, he kept at it, year after year, until he could read Homer in the original. Like all Southern girls, Alice Jane had made a thorough study of the male of the species. She knew the rules by which boys played and wasn’t much surprised when her son’s diffident aloofness and scholastic success combined to provoke his classmates beyond toleration. The first time John Henry came home bloody, all Alice asked was “Did you win?” Later that evening, she told the story of the Spartan mother seeing her son off to war. “Come home with your shield or on it,” Alice reminded him the next morning when he left for school. His cousin Robert followed that moral lecture with another involving applied physics. “Don’t start nothin’,” young Robert advised, “but if some ignorant goddam cracker sonofabitch takes a swing at you? Drop him, son. Use a rock if you have to.” John Henry never did make many friends at school, but the other boys learned to leave him alone – and to copy his answers on exams.

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