The Tombstone Mystique

What’s it mean to market authenticity? That’s the question Kara McCormack, a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Thinking Matters Program at Stanford University, asks in relation to the town where the most famous gunfight in the history of the Old West took place. In Imaging Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die (University Press of Kansas, $27.95) she examines the question from the perspective of historians, preservationists, filmmakers, community boosters and tourists. McCormack’s strength is her ability to bring these disparate elements into a comprehensive profile of a town which is, for much of the world, an enduring symbol of the mythic west.

—Max McCoy, author of Giving up the Ghost