Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

When Gary Gilmore was convicted for a double homicide in 1977, his execution--by firing squad--was the first in the United States in over a decade, and particularly noteworthy because Gilmore refused his right to appeal. Here Gary Gilmore's brother recollects his visits to death row and the meditations on his family life that they inspired.

Editions of Shot in the Heart

ISBN 9780385478007	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Anchor Books	Date 1995	Price $2.49	Very Good
ISBN 9780553471052	Binding/Format Audio Cassette	Publisher Random House	Date 1994	Price $1.53	Used - Good
ISBN 9780385422932	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Bantam Dell Pub Group	Date 1994	Price $2.45	Very Good

Publisher Notes

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioners 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 blacksheep 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 fathers 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. 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.