Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg
You could save the soft data of this publication Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg It will depend on your leisure and tasks to open and also review this book Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg soft documents. So, you may not hesitate to bring this e-book Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg everywhere you go. Simply add this sot file to your gizmo or computer system disk to allow you check out each time as well as everywhere you have time.
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg
Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg. Provide us 5 mins as well as we will show you the most effective book to read today. This is it, the Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg that will be your finest selection for better reading book. Your 5 times will certainly not spend squandered by reading this internet site. You could take guide as a source to make much better idea. Referring the books Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg that can be located with your requirements is at some point tough. However here, this is so simple. You can discover the most effective thing of book Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg that you can read.
There is no question that publication Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg will certainly consistently offer you motivations. Also this is just a book Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg; you could find several categories and sorts of books. From entertaining to adventure to politic, and sciences are all given. As just what we explain, right here we offer those all, from well-known authors and also author on the planet. This Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg is among the compilations. Are you interested? Take it now. Exactly how is the method? Read more this write-up!
When someone must go to guide shops, search shop by shop, rack by shelf, it is extremely troublesome. This is why we give the book compilations in this internet site. It will certainly relieve you to look guide Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg as you like. By searching the title, author, or authors of the book you really want, you can locate them promptly. At home, workplace, or even in your way can be all ideal area within web connections. If you want to download and install the Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg, it is very simple after that, due to the fact that now we extend the connect to buy and make offers to download Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg So very easy!
Curious? Of course, this is why, we expect you to click the web link web page to see, and after that you can take pleasure in the book Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg downloaded till finished. You could save the soft data of this Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg in your gizmo. Obviously, you will bring the gadget anywhere, won't you? This is why, whenever you have spare time, every time you could delight in reading by soft duplicate publication Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, By Andrew C. Isenberg
Finalist for the 2014 Weber-Clements Book Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America
In popular culture, Wyatt Earp is the hero of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, and a beacon of rough cowboy justice in the tumultuous American West. The subject of dozens of films, he has been invoked in battles against organized crime (in the 1930s), communism (in the 1950s), and al-Qaeda (after 2001).
Yet as the historian Andrew C. Isenberg reveals in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction―one created by none other than Earp himself. The lawman played on-screen by Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster is stubbornly duty-bound; in actuality, Earp led a life of impulsive lawbreaking and shifting identities. When he wasn't wearing a badge, he was variously a thief, a brothel bouncer, a gambler, and a confidence man. As Isenberg writes, "He donned and shucked off roles readily, whipsawing between lawman and lawbreaker, and pursued his changing ambitions recklessly, with little thought to the cost to himself, and still less thought to the cost, even the deadly cost, to others."
By 1900, Earp's misdeeds had caught up with him: his involvement as a referee in a fixed heavyweight prizefight brought him national notoriety as a scoundrel. Stung by the press, Earp set out to rebuild his reputation. He spent his last decades in Los Angeles, where he befriended Western silent film actors and directors. Having tried and failed over the course of his life to invent a better future for himself, in the end he invented a better past. Isenberg argues that even though Earp, who died in 1929, did not live to see it, Hollywood's embrace of him as a paragon of law and order was his greatest confidence game of all.
A searching account of the man and his enduring legend, and a book about our national fascination with extrajudicial violence, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life is a resounding biography of a singular American figure.
- Sales Rank: #163116 in Books
- Brand: Isenberg, Andrew C.
- Published on: 2013-06-25
- Released on: 2013-06-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.27" h x 1.25" w x 6.40" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
From Booklist
Wyatt Earp has been the subject of numerous films, biographies, and even a weekly television series. Most of these serve to embellish his reputation as an upholder of law and order and as a man who helped tame raucous frontier towns. Isenberg, a historian at Temple University, is determined to demolish that image, and he largely succeeds. As portrayed here, Earp was an ambitious, hot-tempered, and restless striver, who spent much of his career operating on both sides of the law. As a youth, he fled Arkansas to avoid a trial for horse thievery. As he moved across the West, Earp combined law enforcement with gambling, fronting for prostitutes, and killing one of the assassins of his brother in cold blood. As for the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, Isenberg asserts that political and personal animosities were more important than law enforcement. Still, Earp lived a long, adventurous life, and that seems to get lost as Isenberg recites his laundry list of misdeeds, so this is a useful but often disappointing revisionist biography. --Jay Freeman
Review
“Meticulous . . . illuminat[es] an entire social milieu . . . Beautifully rendered . . . this new biography is a gem, and includes a touching look at Wyatt's single lifelong friendship with Doc Holliday . . . offer[s] the reader an exciting glimpse into vanished forms of American life. The field of Western history has now entered a phase of precision scholarship, [of] deep research and glorious writing.” ―The Wichita Eagle
“This brief, well-written, and superbly researched volume reconfigures the life of the western notable Wyatt Earp.... Anyone who reads this important book is not likely to view Wyatt Earp the same way.” ―Richard Etulain, Journal of American History
“Absorbing . . . Isenberg's brilliance as a historian comes in part from finding the gaps within the myth . . . Wyatt Earp is part biography, part historical nonfiction that reads like a gripping novel. Like David McCollough, Richard Slotkin, Nathaniel Philbruck, and S.C. Gwynne, Isenberg gives us a narrative of the Old West and 19th century America that's at once edifying and exhilarating in its scope.” ―PopMatters
“his is the best dead-on Earp deconstruction I've ever read. At a time when vigilante action is being widely discussed―when we must ask ourselves if standing one's ground after stalking a black teenager translates into justifiable murder―it’s good to know that, in the old days, the issue was even more shockingly unsettled. Not only did Earp slay with impunity, but he also relied on the media to help him wipe the fingerprints and clean up the blood. Isenberg’s book deftly shows how a man of violence remade himself into a man of valor.” ―Tucson Weekly
“Masterful . . . [the book] will be applauded by those who like their history to adhere more closely to facts.” ―The New Mexican (Santa Fe)
“Isenberg carefully separates the historic from the hysterical, examines documents, evaluates sources critically and eventually scrapes away from Earp's image the gilding that cultural history has applied . . . Isenberg shows us Earp as an early Jay Gatsby, reinventing himself continually.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, this weave of a single life and its constantly changing culture shows how an ambitious, violent man from the Midwest who made his name as a gambler, pimp, and all-around enforcer ultimately took up the cause of remaking his own reputation, with enduring consequences for Hollywood myth and popular lore. No biographer has ever illuminated the origins of Wyatt Earp's legend or captured his complexities and contradictions as compellingly and with such beautiful prose as Andrew C. Isenberg does in Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life.” ―Louis S. Warren, author of Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
“Even Wyatt Earp must sometimes stand naked. Andrew C. Isenberg’s new biography of Earp shows us the man bereft of his own mythologizing―a cardsharp, a flimflam man, and most of all a ruthless self-promoter. This is a remarkable and revealing portrait.” ―Thomas Cobb, author of With Blood in Their Eyes and Crazy Heart
“This book is quite simply absorbing. That a life as tangled, contradictory, mythologized, and disguised as Wyatt Earp's could offer such a clear window into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West is a tribute to Andrew C. Isenberg's talent as a historian and writer.” ―Richard White, author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
“With no ax to grind, and showing respect for even the most outrageous attempts at history and biography (which he systematically disassembles), Andrew C. Isenberg has written a reliable guide to Wyatt Earp's conflicted existence.” ―Loren D. Estleman, author of The Perils of Sherlock Holmes
About the Author
Andrew C. Isenberg is the author of Mining California: An Ecological History and The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920, and the editor of The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space. He is a historian at Temple University.
Most helpful customer reviews
41 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
INSIPID AND SOPHOMORIC
By Richard Masloski
If you are looking to learn about the history of squatting (handy if you ever wish to do so yourself), who Damon and Phythias were, how to play faro, the history of boxing with particular focus on the 1896 bout betwixt Sharkey and Fitzsimmons, bootleg booze and temperance societies and so forth, this might be a good book for you. However, if you want to learn well and truly of Wyatt Earp, best to seek elsewhere. In this latest look at the legendary lawman, Earp seems more tangential than anything else. Two examples: after slyly indicating that Earp and his faithful friend Doc Holliday may have been homosexual - this after our author's jaundiced, probable misreading of a comment by Bat Masterson - the last encounter between this combustible couple is given short shrift in two sentences. That's all, folks - yet the aforementioned heavyweight bout spreads itself out over ten or more needlessly detailed pages. Likewise, long-lasting wife Josephine Marcus Earp is treated so marginally that by the book's end one doubts her very existence. Earp dies and is carried to his grave by some prominent pallbearers - yet no mention is made of Josephine's whereabouts in all of this - nor where the casket came to final rest. The many lapses and strange emphases within the text leave the end result as full of holes as the air and participating bodies at the O.K. Corral shootout. Thus, this book is less a biography and more a polemic. The subtitle, indeed, gives one the theme of this extended argument - but the argument itself is antiquated and relatively ancient.
On the inside flap we are told that author Isenberg "reveals..the Hollywood Earp is largely a fiction." Really??? Mention is made of Henry Fonda and Burt Lancaster's superhero portrayals, so the attack on Hollywood is true to a point. But on both the flap and within the pages of the book, Eisenberg mentions naught of Kurt Russell's and Kevin Costner's more nuanced, fallible portrayals - not to mention Harris Yulan's villainous, contemptible creep in the '60's risible DOC. For to mention these latter portrayals would but serve to undermine the central conceit of this book - and that is the already well-known and well-researched fact that Wyatt Earp was, alas, all-too human! Yes, to reveal these other portrayals - both cinematic and biographical - would be to render the necessity of Eisenberg's take as nearly negligible.
Casey Tefertiller mined these hills back in 1997 in his inexorably interesting and entertainingly exhaustive WYATT EARP: THE LIFE BEHIND THE LEGEND. Ditto for Allen Barra's INVENTING WYATT EARP. And there are many other books that illumined the warts behind the facade. This book, alas, tries too hard to breathe life into its subject - which instead of the title is the silly subtitle! - and succeeds not at all for the subtitle is shallow, incomplete and misleading. Isenberg's one-dimensional, vigilante-driven portrait is as untrue and inaccurate as the flip-side of Earp's being a superhero with a six-shooter.
42 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Gunning down a straw man
By J. Cornelius
Isenberg sets up a straw man: the Stuart Lake/Hollywood portrayal of Earp as a paragon of dutiful enforcement of the right and the law. Nobody has seen Earp like that for decades. There have been several excellent books on Wyatt Earp and Tombstone that cast him in a realistic and none-to-flattering light, and even the movies "Wyatt Earp" and "Tombstone" portrayed a much darker version of Wyatt Earp than the stereotype that Isenberg tilts at.
Isenberg is a professor of history at Temple University. That explains a lot. For this book reeks of a particular kind of smug, self-conscious revisionism. I'm all for revising our understanding of history based on new evidence, new analysis. But in the case of Wyatt Earp's reputation, that happened 20 years and more ago. And Isenberg's analysis, at least as it is presented in the beginning of his book, is flawed.
He goes to some length to assert that Earp was an inconstant fellow. Again, that's not news. He was one of thousands trying to scuffle a living in the post-Civil War West. Yep, Wyatt was a brothel bouncer and a gambler, a generally unsuccessful speculator and prospector, a sometime lawman who probably worked the other side of the law on occasion. Really a bit of a low-life who sought and never quite attained respectability. He was also genuinely courageous and loyal to family and friends.
Some of this is risible:
"In Wichita, he left behind his police partner Jimmy Cairns, with whom he had shared a bed."
Wink.
Please. Did we not go through all this with Abraham Lincoln? Common practice, folks. But wait, Jim, maybe he's not, you know, implying anything.
Sorry.
"...in addition to Cairns, his relationship with (Doc) Holliday was so close that it was described by one contemporary as romantic."
Wink. Nudge. No citation.
Really? We have to go to the "homoerotic" thing? A professor of history should understand that Victorian men and women existed in different spheres. Yes, men had profound relationships with other men, especially men with whom they had shared danger. I had a professor in college who was quite invested in convincing me that the relationship between frontiersmen "blood brothers" Simon Kenton and Simon Girty was homosexual or at least "homoerotic." What's the deal with this?
Isenberg's credibility really suffers when he notes all the people Wyatt abandoned (his long-time common law wife Mattie Blaylock, who had in all likelihood been a prostitute and returned to the trade after Wyatt dumped her) and fails to note that he stuck with his common law wife Josie Marcus for 47 years. Didn't fit the thesis, I guess.
There are additional questionable assertions:
"His resort to vigilantism in 1882 was not an act of a man unwaveringly committed to justice in a frontier territory where courts were corrupt, but the impulsive vengeance of a man who had long disdained authority."
Well, except for the fact that Earp was still a deputy U.S. marshal during the Vendetta Ride. Both Earp and his enemies were acting under color of law. Far from disdaining authority, Earp consistently sought to put himself on the side of the law and of authority. True, not because he was necessarily "unwaveringly committed to justice," but because he craved legitimacy and respectability. And protection from prosecution.
Isenberg also misrepresents Earp's eventual publicity seeking.
"Consumed in his last years with justifying his resort to violence in Arizona, he told and retold stories of his life as a law officer in Tombstone and in the Kansas cow towns of Wichita and Dodge City in the 1870s."
Wyatt Earp was never more than marginally financially stable. In his later years, he tried to sell his story. He was always trying to hustle some money. But he didn't make it easy. Getting him to talk was a chore.
Sure, he was self-justifying (honestly, ain't we all?) -- and his collaborators colluded in that effort. But it wasn't a case of being consumed by a need to scrub the record. That better describes Josie, who exerted a ridiculous amount of editorial control over depictions of Wyatt after his death. She definitely endeavored to sanitize Wyatt and especially herself.
It would take a lot to overturn the picture of Wyatt Earp painted by the excellent biography by Casey Tefertiller. This "Vigilante Life" certainly doesn't seem likely to get it done.
31 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
THIS BOOK DOESN'T DESERVE ONE STAR!!
By B Ardell Young
Since Amazon requires one star to review a product, this book gets one star. Amazon should really think about that policy.
About the only thing true, in the book, is Wyatt Earp was a real person and he lived in the American West, in the late 19th century. I feel safe with this statement, though, I am sure the author may have included a few other(very few) factual statements.
I have read every book, article, and unpublished works written about Wyatt Earp, in the English language, and this book is probably the worst attack on Earp ever printed and there have been several books, in the past eighty years.
The author does not allow one paragraph to get by him without a negative sentence about Earp and that requires some work. He borrows from long-time Earp critic's such as Steve Gatto, who edits a web-site that is highly critical of Wyatt Earp. Gatto wrote a biography about Johnny Ringo that attempts to turn a well documented criminal into a good guy, who hung out with a bad crowd. It is apparent that the author also used other known Earp critics as source material.
His description of Earp's vigilante posse (March 1882) that hunted down some of Morgan Earp's assassins is priceless. According to the author, it showed Earp's law-breaking ways when things did not go his way. In reality, Earp had spent his entire six years in law enforcement protecting known criminals from being harmed, which included Curly Bill Brocious, who planned both attacks on the Earp Brothers.
Anyone interested in Wyatt Earp should read the following books since they cover different parts of Earp's life and time in Tombstone. "Wyatt Earp" by Casey Tefertiller, "Inventing Wyatt Earp by Allan Barra, and "And Die In The West" by Paula Mitchell Marks. All of the books present a very balance view of Wyatt Earp and do not reflect any bias, by the authors.
See all 31 customer reviews...
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg PDF
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg EPub
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Doc
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg iBooks
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg rtf
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Mobipocket
Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Kindle
* Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Doc
* Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Doc
* Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Doc
* Ebook Free Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, by Andrew C. Isenberg Doc
