All for Love
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Adventuress, miner, home-wrecker, pauper, dreamer—the drama of Colorado legend Baby Doe’s life has inspired several biographies, a 1932 film starring Edward G. Robinson, even an opera, but never before a novel.
Few lives have been so dramatic—leaving Oshkosh, WI and heading toward Colorado’s mining territory in 1879, she ditched her husband and snared silver magnate Horace Tabor, who divorced his wife to marry Baby in the “wedding of the century.”
“A furiously bubbling stew of a manner of ingredients, a grab bag stuffed to the bursting point with the real and invented.” –-The New York Times Book Review
“The novel proposes that shall feel those distinctly nineteenth-century emotions of wonder and surprise…in fact, that we shall experience an old world in a new way.” –-The Boston Globe
“A terrific read…Vernon seems able to write with fluency and authority—and at times with delicacy and profundity.” –-Los Angeles Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Literate and raunchy, wildly colorful and meticulously researched, Vernon's third self-described ``historical fiction'' recreates the real-life saga of Baby Doe Tabor (nee Elizabeth McCourt), a gold digger from Oshkosh, Wis., who married wealthy Colorado mine owner Horace Tabor, became a society lady and lost her entire fortune. Baby Doe is portrayed here as a selfish, sexually voracious, bitchy social climber; yet her love for the oafish, blustering Horace, and for their daughter, Silver Dollar, is touching. In Vernon's (Peter Doyle) assured hands the characters exhibit fierce dignity and manic energy. Scandal attended the 1883 marriage of 26-year-old divorcee Baby Doe and her 52-year-old lover of a decade. On his deathbed 16 years later, deeply into debt through bad investments and reckless spending, he urged Baby Doe to hold on to the Matchless Mine in Leadville, Colo. She lived through the Depression in a shack beside the unproductive silver mine, consorting with hobos, seeking refuge in Jesus and inhabiting her fantasies, dying in 1935. Silver Dollar, a burlesque dancer and prostitute in Al Capone's Chicago, wrote songs, poems and sensational novels. Quoting verbatim from letters and newspaper articles and from records of Oscar Wilde's 1882 lecture stop in Leadville, Vernon has fashioned a classically American, true-grit saga of greed, dreams and delusions. His frisky prose races along like quicksilver, exuding vitality and quirkiness in equal parts.
