How long does it take to read Shot in the Heart?
Mikal Gilmore
Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore takes about 9 hours 31 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 31 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1994. 519 pages, about 142,725 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 15 hours 52 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 31 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 5 hours 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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
