Title: Shot in the heart
First published: 1994
Description: 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  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  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. 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Subjects: Case studies, Violence, Murder, Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Biography, Capital punishment, Crime and criminals, Murderers, Homicide, Murder, united states, New York Times reviewed
Places: United States
People: Gilmore family, Gary Gilmore
LC classification: HV6529 .G55 1994