Shot in the Heart: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

Mikal Gilmore

juil. 2000 · Penguin Random House Audio · Lu par Will Patton

À propos de ce livre audio

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.

À propos de l'auteur

Mikal Gilmore has covered and criticized rock & roll, its culture, and related issues for many national publications.  He was music editor for the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and for twenty years has worked on the staff of Rolling Stone, where he has profiled many national figures.  His first book, Shot in the Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.