The Executioner's Song
by:
Norman Mailer (author)
In the summer of 1976 Gary Gilmore robbed two men. Then he shot them in cold blood. For those murders Gilmore was sent to languish on Death Row - and could confidently expect his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. In America, no one had been executed for ten years. But Gary Gilmore...
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In the summer of 1976 Gary Gilmore robbed two men. Then he shot them in cold blood. For those murders Gilmore was sent to languish on Death Row - and could confidently expect his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment. In America, no one had been executed for ten years. But Gary Gilmore wanted to die, and his ensuing battle with the authorities for the right to do so made him into a world-wide celebrity - and ensured that his execution turned into the most gruesome media event of the decade.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
0316544175
Publish date: 1979
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages no: 56
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Non Fiction,
Biography,
Writing,
History,
Literature,
American,
20th Century,
Mystery,
Journalism,
Crime,
True Crime
This review was originally posted on amazon on August 23, 2004. It's been approximately 35 years (edited: it has now been 45 years) since this book was originally published. In the interim, the public has seen many men executed, some clearly worse than Gary Gilmore, including Ted Bundy and Timothy...
Unlike anything else I've ever read in just how naturally absorbed you are by the story and its many inhabitants. Glad I trusted Dave Eggars' entreaty that it would be "the fastest 1,000 pages you will ever know."
Unlike anything else I've ever read in just how naturally absorbed you are by the story and its many inhabitants. Glad I trusted Dave Eggars' entreaty that it would be "the fastest 1,000 pages you will ever know."
I get what Mailer's doing here. He's using the case of murderer Gary Gilmore to raise big questions about good and evil and free will, and it's a smart thing to do and he does a good job. But that doesn't change that it's a bummer of a book.And it should have been pruned. It is important for Mailer ...
Yawn. Yeah Norman, you're a tough little Harvard grad who spent all his writing energy on self-promotion.
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