Shane

Rating:
Summary: Shane
Review: This book is about a guy named Shane who rides into Wyoming who is very mysterious. He trys to help a freind out and only makes it worse,but makes evrything better in the end. The reason I liked this book is because it tells you how the west was. It makes you feel like your actually there. I didn't like that he didn't get a girl or a big amount of land for it,but what can you say for a freind who rides alone with one dark side you don't wnat to be on.

Rating:
Summary: Of heroes
Review: Most of us know "Shane" from the excellent movie that remains a high-water mark of realistic depiction of the Old West. Better than the novel could, the movie conveys the dust and grime, the slower pace of events, the backbreaking work of a kind no one in America knows anymore -- and the ways confrontations were handled before the arrival of law and order.

Commonly a book excels its movie, and this one is no exception. The story proceeds as a brewing range war between a Wyoming rancher and small farmers toward the end of the 19th Century. Ironically, in the never-ending struggle between "the old ways" and modernization, the small farmer here represents modernization - and small farmers themselves no longer exist.

The principal characters embody themes as old as literature. Before farmers ever got there, the rancher Fletcher cleared the range of marauding Indians by whatever means worked. In a might-makes-right situation, it probably needed such men to lead the westward migration. Fletcher certainly considers himself wronged as farmers begin taking over the land for which he put his life on the line. That the law favors them doesn't matter; Fletcher respects force and little else.

Joe Starrett emblemizes the civilizing virtues: energy, intelligence, sense of community and honor, moral and physical courage, self-discipline, belief in family and self. In a later Schaefer novel Starrett reappears as Chet Rollins. His very physique - large, awkward, physically powerful - stands as a bulwark to which his fellow farmers repair for advice and leadership. Especially in lawless circumstances, such men represent the institutions of civilization to the less sturdy.

Shane is many things, all of them complex. The book cover caricatures him as a gunfighter who can't escape his past. Shane is more than that; he's a white knight, his life echoing the Greeks who said that character is destiny. A man of substance who disdains the company of most, Shane honors substance in the Starretts. They take to each other immediately.

But Shane has another side that he keeps on a leash: the inner leopard, the big cat that lives and hunts alone, striking fear in those around him. "Bad ones like him are poison," Starrett observes. Shane unhesitatingly takes on hugely uneven odds against Morgan and his gang in the saloon, and it isn't just, or even particularly, courage or heroism. He instinctively relishes combat, violent action, dominance, perhaps even cruelty. The leopard blood passion -- and control of it - occupy Shane's core. He cannot be imagined without both.

Shane brings to mind another hero who entered American consciousness 13 years before this book appeared: Rhett Butler. Rhett has more rebellion in him, but shares with Shane an unerring sense of himself and the milieu in which he moves. Both manifest extraordinary physical ability and competence. As Rhett truly respects only Melanie Wilkes, so Shane only truly respects Joe and Marian Starrett. Neither man feels threatened at knowing "women's stuff" such as ladies' hat styles. Both understand the crucial importance of role models to kids. We know more of Rhett than of Shane, but we do know that Shane somehow let himself down in the past, as Rhett before joining the fight against the North.

At a deep level, this story concerns free will and its consequences. It deals with the choices men make and how the con-sequences of these condition further choosing. Men are tested constantly, and must constantly choose the moral tenor of their response. A man who yields to cowardice, in the many ways that can be done, does irremediable violence to his soul. Once done, it can't be undone and he can't be who he was. Good men have always known this; it's why honor matters, projecting their sense of themselves as moral agents. What others think also matters, but secondarily to their self-opinion.

This theme bears directly on another, that of heroes: what a hero looks like in real life and how he affects others. Schaefer doesn't want us to miss this, so he provides a stark contrast with Shane in the person of Stark Wilson, a man with whom Shane has a great deal in common. Wilson, too, is a leopard. But while Shane puts his leopard passion in the service of principle, Wilson indulges his passion. With jungle mentality, he lives for the kill. These men made different choices along the way, and those choices conditioned all that followed. One can imagine Shane degenerating morally into a Wilson, but cannot imagine Wilson, all moral decay and depravity, evolving into a Shane.

Hence Schaefer, perhaps without realizing it, posits morality as evolutionarily selected. Yet neither Shane nor Wilson marry, and indeed one can't imagine either of them domesticated. They are curiously sexless. But Shane will have progeny in the persons of those who idolize and model on him. Wilson's blatant evil drives others away. He lives solely for himself, so much so that he has nothing to give anyone. His role in the world is to serve as a bad example.

Six years before this book appeared, Ayn Rand brought out one of the great novels on the theme of heroes. The Fountainhead explicates the philosophical issues, but lacks the balance and realism of Shane. In Rand's pantheon, Shane would fit right in while Joe Starrett would barely merit mention. Her heroes never have children, the reason FOR civilization. Yet in everyday living we seldom encounter a Shane while running into Joe Starretts often. Starrett is the enduring hero who has much more to lose (hence to win) than Shane does. Shane is Michael Jordan, magnificent in action, stirring and memorable, the apotheosis of excellence, showing what's possible. But that level of excellence is physically beyond most of us. It's for admiring rather than emulating.

The day-to-day heroes matter more. Joe Starrett needs Shane, but everyone else needs Joe Starrett. Shane knows this. His role is to step in as needed and then, work done, to move on. As he does in this interesting and most excellent short novel.

Rating:
Summary: Not that great- not worth the time
Review: I had to read this book for a 7th grade report, and belive me, it was terrible. The whole school hated it, all the teachers too-except the ones who taught literature. Is this some universally bad book for kids, and great book for adults into literature? I strongly object one of the other reveiws,the one who says kids who don't like this book haven't read "great literature." I love to read, and even though Western novels aren't my favorite, I do know the difference between a good book and a bad one- this was clearly one bad book. Many reviewers say this book was too descriptive. It definatly was, but that is not a major reson to dislike this book. The major thing was that it was too boring, I couldn't read more than ten pages before starting to skip words, sentences, even paragraphs.

Rating:
Summary: Shane
Review: I would recommend this book to someone else because it is very exciting and interesting. The characters were well constructed throughout the book and it had a lot of unusual twists to it. This book was very easy to read and it's a good book to read especially if you like western stories.

Rating:
Summary: A book with an identity crisis
Review: This novel is trying to mix two contradicting styles of storywriting: Westerns and good books. True, my bias against the former may have contributed to my hatred of this book, but I can also tell when books are bad, and this is one of them.

The story starts off with the shady character Shane riding into the small homesteading community where the Starret family resides. Said family quickly welcomes Shane into their home and befriend him. From here, standard Western novel fare occurs. The main conflicts in this story are the ones between the homesteaders & the ranchers and Shane & his inner demons. These could've, and should've, provided for some very interesting plot twists and good character development. Instead, we get similes and metaphors that are mediocre at best, tacked-on shows of character, and the absolutely annoying title character. He is annoying because he never seemed to get hurt by anything. The author seemed to try at least to humanize Shane by giving him personal problems, but he still appeared to feel no pain and lose no battle (if you ignore his fight to escape his past). I was expecting, even hoping for realism's sake, that he would die at the end of the book, but no, he still lived. Other than that, however, I was able to predict nearly every event in this boring story.

Like many of those that have reviewed this book, I had to read it in middle school (8th grade, to be exact). However, I read on a regular basis (and I mean actual books, not just magazines). Shane pales in comparison to real books like The Island of Dr. Moreau and 1984. So if you are looking for a gripping, powerful tale that keeps you reading until you are done, then look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Showing its age.
Review: It's been a bit over thirty years since I last read this...... I've recently read, Charles Portis', True Grit. With respect to the Western context you can see where Clint Eastwood's Fistfull of Dollars and High Plains Drifter came out of, though that has been as much attributed to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. And although I wanted to like this book as much as my vague memory of it suggested, I found it to be slow going, with it's unengaging prose style, exacerbated by the first person retrospection of the main character, which was too detailed to be convincing for a boy so young. A characteristic not unique to Jack Schaefer for this kind of book. Sure the story was good, heavily viewpointed, and moralistic, but that kind of thing is done better now, as in the Star Trek tie in books by the likes of L.A, Graf, and K.W. Jeter. It seems to me that Shane is a book of its time, which is unfortunately not this one, with respect to the younger audience it was originally intended for.

For me it's the style of Shane more than anything else, that leaves me unenthusiastic. But it should please others.

Rating:
Summary: shane
Review: the unforgettable novel of boy's love and a gunman's struggle to escape his past

Rating:
Summary: shane
Review: the unforgettable novel of a boy's love and a gunman's struggle to escape his past.

Rating:
Summary: Ridin' Out in a Fury...
Review: I'm a 7th grader who just finished writing this review for my class and my teacher accused me of cheating. She said it was too good for a 7th grader to write. My mother suggested that I send my review in and consider it a vote of confidence. This action-filled western fiction, set in the late 1880's has an unpredictable ending. When a restless gunman rides into a hard working, god-fearing family, they provide him with honest work and stability. The untouchable gunman changes his negative actions into positive actions by fighting for justice of the commom man in a Wyoming valley of corrupted cattlemen. The setting provided a historic look into the past of the taming of the west and its enduring bloodshed of the ending of open ranges and the beginning of grazing wars between the farming homesteaders and the established ranchers. The main character's defenses of isolation and destitute unravel into a caring, justice-seeking, loyal man whose attributes contribrute to the small homesteading community. Finding his acceptance among man, the main character, unpredictably returns to his engraved dynamics of aloneness and shatters the lives of the people who grew so close to him. This novel impressed upon my mind the cliche'"The road to heaven is paved with good intentions", showing me that he couldn't distance his past and feel comfortable in his own skin where ever he roamed. SHANE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO CHANGE A NEGATIVE TO A POSITIVE-BUT I SURE CAN! JESSE MILLER

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: In skimming the reviews below, it appears most of the negative ones are from adolescents and/or semi-literate readers. "Shane" is a classic story, a nearly pure good-vs.-evil myth.

It's interesting to compare the Shane of the novel with the portrayal by Alan Ladd. There are some marked differences, but both the book and movie versions seem appropriate to the overall mood of the story.