Customer Reviews:
 Read this book! December 3, 2001
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I am Tara Nafziger, an eighth grader, who read Shane for one of my classes. I read this book and was amazed at how much meaning they could put into a small book. Like the TV show Seventh Heaven, the story is fun to read and not only tells morals, but makes it so you see the sense in them and want to become a good person. While I read it, sometimes I wanted to cry, and sometimes tears came to my eyes for laughing so hard. Shane is a hero worth looking up to, but he is not the only one, for there are other people, like Joe and Marian, who are given great qualities that may inspire children to be the best person they can be. I reccommend this book to people of all ages, it is a classic you would not want to miss.
 Shane and the Cold West September 19, 2000
15 out of 31 found this review helpful
To me, in 1955, Shane was pigs, dawn and din. Elicidation.My Royal Artillery regiment was stationed in Oldenburg, in Germany, in a former SS barracks. Most days a fifteen-stone blond Welshman would depart for his job (giving the Colonel's pigs their breakfast) some time before dawn. He ululated 'Shane, Shane!' and was lost in the pre-dawn dark, leaving the barracks wearily thinking of Shane and retribution. Shane was a great movie. It need not have been. Alan Ladd was an unlikely Western hero. He was a presence in a lounge suit, not in levis. He was bitter, sure, and this role demanded bitterness. But his was an urban, modern bitterness, a 'wee small hours of the morning' thing, a comfortable bitterness with cigarettes and air conditioning and bonded liquor. The role of Shane called for something other, a drunken trail town kind of bitterness, the smell of smoky fires on the prairie, the talk of illiterate cowboys, the smell of kerosene lamps and whisky, greasy cards on green baize, the oblivious vast land outside the saloons, the imprint of the wind on the prairie grass. There are two fictive Wests: the Southern, Desert West, the Apaches; and the North, Mountain West, the cold West, the West of the Sioux and the Cheyenne. In one, the hero has to deal with Indians and sun; the other, Indians and snow. The West of Jack Schaeffer is generally the latter, the Mountain, cold West. The locale of Shane is Wyoming, the Mountain State with its face to Canada, the tundra, the haunted spaces of the darkling North. It is an Indian West, but in this story they have gone, there is nothing left of them but memory, something in the sky. The ingredients are familiar: sodbusters versus ranchers; the range war. The book is unusual in having a young boy for narrator. This has at first sight a narrowing effect. The book will have to be consonant with the insight and unformed intelligence of a rural youngster, with little grasp of adult concerns and motives. It also has a liberating effect. It allows both author and reader to fill in the gaps of sensibility with the input from the action and the scenery. Nothing of depth is expressed, for instance, about the Civil War and the passionate attachment to the South. In all serious portraits of the West in its usual era (1870-90), there is a shadow - blood on the moon in the Union case, or the lost Confederacy on the other. And nothing is said about the triangle of loyalty, affection and sexual longing of the Starretts, the wild attraction of Shane. It is a memory of place that I was left with from this novel. The sense of the 'noble sadness' of the prairie, the valley streams, cold in the summer heats, the silver birches in the sun, the departed Indians haunting the ground. Place, passion, and the waste of history. Shane himself is all the mightier for being a mystery.
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