Thursday, November 17, 2005

Shot in the Heart

I'm still slogging through In Cold Blood; it's turning out to be not so bad but I did get distracted from it when I went into Barnes & Noble and saw this book:

Shot in the Heart: by Mikal Gilmore. This is Mikal Gilmore's award-winning memoir of growing up in the same family with Gary Gilmore, the first man to be executed after the United States reinstated the death penalty. It's a fascinating look into an extremely dysfunctional family. Shot in the Heart is also well-researched and well-written. Mikal Gilmore tries his best not to flinch from some hard truths about his family -- extreme physical abuse by the father, fighting between the parents, clear favoritism of one child over another, the reformatory for Gary at a young age, the death of another brother Gaylen, the mysterious past of the father. I've been carried along with the narrative of Shot in the Heart in almost the same way a good novel keeps me wanting to turn the page. This book was made into a movie by HBO; a movie that I also liked even if it was overly long. Mikal Gilmore doesn't pretend to have the answers to why Gary turned out the way he did; he just wants to ask the questions.

2 comments:

Kathy said...

It's very well-written. That's one of the reasons I liked it so much.

Dixie said...

I LOVED this book! I read it - oh...maybe nine or ten years ago and I loved it.

I've read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song about ten times (it's one of my favorite books) so I was dead familiar with that side of Gary Gilmore's story and Mikal's account filled in so many spots. I find the whole thing about that family so interesting.