Untamed Breed download epub

my husbands book order. He loved it. He will keep it in his collection of early frontier type books. Likes true type stories.

I'm about 1/3 into this book. This is not a book review at this point but really a warning to would-be readers. The story is pretty good but the writing is a little over the top. There's a little too much with the mutilation of the slain. Heads cut off, private parts, and all around mutilations. It feels somewhat gratuitous the way it was done. And there's sex. Now I'm not a prude by any means, but I don't care for reading about t*ts and c**ks in this type of book. And the main character (Quint) is something like Superman or Batman (at least at the beginning of the book). In the hands of another writer this could have been an outstanding book. Instead it loses points for what just feels like unnecessary descriptions of violence and sex. But again, I do like the overall story so far. This book sort of reminds me of Brules by Harry Combs, except Combs was a little better in his writing.

March 21, 2014:
Finished the book this morning. This had the makings of a classic but misses the mark in the end. The main character - Quint - is from Scotland. Sometimes his speech reflects this and other times he speaks like he was born American. The author should have been consistent. Also, I felt that parts of the story were a little too over the top and lost their realism. Lastly, I don't think the book was edited. There were quite a few instances of misspelled words and misplaced letters where they don't belong. I'm not holding that against the story, just pointing it out. It makes me think the book was not proofed or reviewed by an editor. As for the story itself, it was a good one but falls short of being a classic of the mountain man genre and I never quite made the emotional attachment with it that I have with other similar books, such as The Big Sky by A B Guthrie, Brules by Harry Combs and The Great Adventure by Janice Holt Giles. I will say, however, that the author did some good background research on the place and times.

You betchum Red Ryder, this book is stuffed with violence and man-talk of sex. Shirreffs injects sufficient points of view from the women to drive home the near-slave-hood they lived at the time, and how they reciprocated treatment on their exploiters. Shirreffs does explain why he included those topics, and embeds his explanation in the narrative of the story. He explains that such was the true life in the environs. Shirreffs included such coarse subject matter (as did Shakespeare, btw) in order to paint *all* the numbers. Inclusion was not done as a commercial means to fulfill the reader who has a prurient mind. If prurient is what a reader wants, the reader would be advised to instead pursue Dirk Fletcher's "Spur" series. If there were any truth to Flecher's characters' deeds, then I'd bet heavy money that most STDs west of the Atlantic Ocean were transmitted by Spur McCoy, assisted by the women he likely infected. Likewise the 400+ books in the "Jake Logan's Slocum" series (initially a Playboy production written by three different ghost authors) promises three steamy adult scenes per short book. In contrast, Shirreffs inclusion of body fluids other than blood is very tame.

Life in the areas of The Untamed Breed was indeed brutal. Those areas were heavily-populated by people who clearly would not be tolerated in a "more civilized" local. Unfortunately, had Shirreffs candied up his prose, he would not have been properly depicting the life of a mountain man, nor the lives of the local "heathens". For example, the author points out several times that the only Indian a mountain man would trust with his life were Delaware. Even the Delaware did not trust any other tribe knowing that when times got "weird" they were just as likely to be brutalized.

Shirreffs wrote these books without the aid of digital manuscripts. The Leisure series are reprints, and were likely typeset by somebody other than the author. At that time in the publishing world, western novels were considered pulp trade and did not receive costly extreme editing oversight that one expects of today's hardbound million-seller novels. Considering 352 pages of close-set small type, there were relatively few glaring errors. Moreover, I found no technical errors in the description and use of weaponry, animal husbandry, vehicles, social mores, period clothing, diet, military strategies and blunders, political climates, economies, trade goods, weather, medical practices (Shirreffs' characters take months to heal, not Hollywood days), and (not least) dialects used.

Most certainly (as depicted in the story), the protagonist Quint spoke several different dialects, Scots being his native preference. However, when men of many different languages get together, it was expected that one switch to the prevailing dialect at that spot in order to be understood. After all, the region was a "Land of Babel" with hundreds of different languages. Leave it to vain Americans to expect to only learn one way to speak, even in our own country.

When Quint is speaking with a Scot's dialect, he does so only with his closest friends, or to himself, or when he is extremely angry. It is when he *must* be direct that he switches to the dialect specific to the recipient. Dialect switching is a traditional story-line tool that that good authors use with the same effect that William Faulker used in The Sound And The Fury.

Make no mistake, this is brutal reading for the uninitiated. It claws the pretty eyes out of the "history" we were taught about how "the west was won." It was not "won." It was raped with religious fervor by financial greed, then stolen with cunning duplicity and mass force. That is what is depicted in this book.

The Untamed Breed is the brutal blueprint for how culture rape has happened repeatedly over the past 5,000 years and continues today all around the world. Only the languages, politicians, business interests and religious zealots have changed.

Do I regret reading The Untamed Breed? Nope. It is one heck of a pseudo-documentary of the life that was.

Will I read the next two books in this series? I think not. Looking ahead to the continuing plot line, I can see a very troubled family, one that violently splits apart with the Civil War. There is so much truth in there that I wish instead to spend my time reading some candied-up westerns where the two most important body parts are the fist and jaw, and wherein a knuckle sandwich to the face solves most of the world's problems with little if any effect to one's hand. I want a world where a good man has no shades of gray, where women hold virtue more dear than life, and bodily elimination never comes out of the water closet.