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Shot in the Heart

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

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Shot in the Heart

By: Mikal Gilmore
Narrated by: Will Patton
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About this listen

 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.©1994 Mikal Gilmore; (P) Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, All Rights Reserved Art & Literature Authors Dysfunctional Families Murder Parenting & Families Relationships True Crime Exciting

Critic reviews

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

"One of the most beautifully written, moving nonfiction books published in the past five years." -- Deidre Donahue, USA Today.

"Remarkable, astonishing... Shot in the Heart reads like a combination of Brothers Karamazov and a series of Johnny Cash ballads... chilling, heartbreaking, and alarming." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times.

"Mesmerizing... riveting and immensely moving... Shot in the Heart is a gesture of sustained courage that just happens to be a page-turner." -- Daphne Merkin,The New Yorker.
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It is imperative to have read or know the story of Gary Gilmore to fully take advantage of the background this book gives. I read Norman Mailer's book many years ago because I was intrigued at the time of Gilmore's death by the State. This book gives a rounded account of the family life of the children as they grew up and how that life affected them and made them all feel as they became adults. Definitely an excellent follow up to the life of Gary Gilmore and his family. Was easy to listen to and the narrator wasn't intrusive.

A good conclusion to the story

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