Shot in the Heart

Shot in the HeartNATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged. Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, he has] never been able to leave." Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 08/01/1995
ISBN: 9780385478007
Pages: 416
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 8.02h x 5.30w x 1.13d
Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Winner

Review Citations: New York Times 09/24/1995 pg. 40
New York Times 12/03/1995 pg. 88
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 01/01/1995 pg. 88
Publishers Weekly 07/31/1995