Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * A murder tale "from inside the house where murder is born." 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 his story "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.

Mikal Gilmore is a music aficionado and journalist who has been writing for Rolling Stone magazine since the 1970s. Shot in the Heart, his debut book, was a National Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times bestseller. His older brother Gary, the first man to be executed in Utah after pleading guilty to murder, is the subject of this New York Times Book Prize-winning memoir.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385478007
ISBN 10	0385478003
Title	Shot in the Heart
Author	Mikal Gilmore
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc
Year published	1995-08-01
Number of pages	416
Prizes	Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards 1994
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.