Product Description

This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of murderer Gary Gilmore's desire to die. In the summer of 1976 Gilmore robbed two men and then shot them in cold blood. No one had been executed in America for ten years but Gilmore, rather than have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, wanted to die, and his ensuing battle with the authorities for the right to do so made him a worldwide celebrity and ensured that his execution turned into a gruesome media event.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71070 in Books
• Published on: 1991-08-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1062 pages

Customer Reviews

Spellbound for a 1000 pages
Mailer's tour de force. This monster book (+1000 pages long)tells the true story of an intelligent convict on parole in 1976, falling into his bad ways, and meets destiny calmly.

Mailer tells the story as an old Greek bard - in the end, it seems the only way things could have happened. Mailer gets into the skin of most people involved or related, describes their feelings (perfectly understable), measures the impact on America (wow! a convicted killer demands a right to die, overruling his own defence, apparently supporting the idea behind the penal code etc).

The other main storyline is oddly a love affair (also factual, not fictional) between the convicted and a girl. It is essetially a story of two social drop outs, two drifters but nevertheless really 'gelling' to use a modern term.

Doesn't bore for one bit. Good story on the madness of the US criminal system, the criminals, their families, their victims the press. In a way it shows that people in the end care (mainly about their own interests) and at the same time be totally careless, cyanical. Makes you think about society.

Of course, Mailer being Mailer, a lot of sex, drugs and violence are on the pages, but do not dominate the story.

The whole thing just takes you by the hand & after the 1000-odd pages, a big sigh & many thoughts pass.

Recommended.

An exceptional tale of desire to change history
The executioners song is a compelling tale of one mans desire to end his own life and change the lives of many more forever.

A convicted murderer who had spent many years behind bars tasted freedom, vices and love. Throws them away along with the lives of his family and lover. He continues to control and dominate his lover to the point of her ending her life. He expresses an enormous desire to receive his just reward for killing innocent men and escape forever his torment of prison.

The story doesn't go into why he spent many years in prison prior to being released on parole. This element of his life may have had some impact as to why he did what he did later. The ardous battle with his family and lawyers for him to escape from his prison life ahead of him is compelling. The impact that his actions had on America is unbelievable. His words of just do it explain his casual approach to murder and death but did he do it for attention? The lives of so many have been affected and those close to him are the only ones who can say.

I have read this masterpiece over the last nine years and each time understand a little more. Would his suicide have affected the rest of America as his execution? Control freak or coward? More questions will be raised, reading may supply the answer.

Limited appeal
So, The Executioner`s Song won the Pulitzer Prize, but I suspect that may have been in recognition of Norman Mailer`s exhaustive research and all the time and effort he put into writing it. Full marks for that.

However, it`s not a reader-friendly book, and I think it would `appeal` more to students of subjects such as the media or the legal history of the US. There`s a lot of detailed description in the book of the legal procedures involved in aiding, or not aiding, a convicted murderer in his fight to have his execution carried out; and also of the wheeling and dealing of the different media people looking for a good story.
Factual and historically accurate, may be, but it`s not exactly compelling, for someone looking for a good read..

As for the book`s protagonist - well, there`s nothing particularly interesting about Gary Gilmore, the career petty-criminal who, by his mid-thirties, had spent about half of his life in penitentiaries, and then ended up killing two innocent strangers for no particular reason. As criminals and crimes go, it was all rather banal. Yes, he had a high IQ, but then so do most, if not all, sociopaths/psychopaths, including the violent criminal types like Gilmore, so that didn`t make him any more interesting or exceptional, either. If it hadn`t been for the one notable fact(the only one in the whole sorry tale) that Gilmore insisted his execution be carried out, I don`t think we would have even heard of the guy. He would have been just another anonymous loser; and one who had no regard for human life, including, in the end, his own - not to mention that of his impressionable young lover(and mother of young children)whom he urged to commit suicide rather than go with any other man.

To be fair, this case probably was sensational and fascinating at the time, but reading about it now, thirty years on, it just seems irrelevant, and the book makes for an exceptionally trying and underwhelming read.

I don`t know if there`s an afterlife, but if there is, I`m sure that the non-entity that was Gary Gilmore must be very amused to know that so many people have gone to the trouble of plodding through such a long-winded account of his sad and otherwise unremarkable waste of a life.

The Executioner`s Song has the rare distinction of being both boring and offensive. I couldn`t help feeling that the book was essentially just about Gilmore himself. Like he was important or something! The whole thing has almost an elegiac feel to it. It`s as if it`s all about poor Gary and what could have been....and never mind the people he killed and their bereaved loved ones.