The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer Summary and Reviews
|
Our Price: $39.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $6.39 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Executioner's Song
Book Review: the book
Summary: 4 Stars
I just finished reading The Executioner's Song, and I don't know what to feel. I don't know if I should be scared that I feel I can connect to a murderer who died 20 years ago. Maybe I should rejoice in knowing that I can empathize (and therefore begin to forgive in my own heart) such a dispicable man. As I read the novel, I built a love-hate relationship between myself and a CHARACTER FROM A BOOK that was dead before my parents met. I understood his thoughts, and the intentions behind his actions, yet I hated him for not being strong enough to will his talent towards helping humanity and making himself a better person. I think that Gilmore deserved to die, and I liked the fact that he didn't question society's morals, but instead displayed them in bold italics for society to criticize themself. Inside of him was a potential for greatness, just like I feel there is inside me, and it chills me to think that I am comparing myself to a murderer as I tread through the passa! ! ges of the book. I think Mailer was perfect in recreating the character of Gary Gilmore in prose. Too many times, vicious people are made into victims of society by the media (i.e. the Menendez brothers) and aren't held accountable for their own actions. Mailer doesn't do this, he simply tells us who Gilmore is. His passion for his true love and his morality. How many other writers would have understood that Gilmore, in accepting and embracing his "right to die" wasn't doing so for publicity, but instead to show a society that he should have hated that doing the right thing is neither easy nor popular, but necessary in order to maintain a world that has both order and compassion? Mailer has been commended many times for this work, and he has deserved every word of it.Book Review: the futility of the death penalty
Summary: 5 Stars
norman mailer wrote a massive and brilliant story which reveals the utter futility of the death penalty as a deterrent. Gary Gilmore spent half his life in prison and finally got his wish: to be executed. At the time of his execution, the death penalty was rarely used in the U.S as opposed to today where Texas alone seems to have a coupleof executions every month. The killing continues both by the criminals and the state and there are those who believe the temporary drop in the murder rate is a result of the death penalty instead of what it really is: the temporary drop in the population group that commits most murders and other violent crimes, young men between 15-27 years of age.Mailer details Gilmore wanting the death penalty and getting his wish. Yet there are still those who claim it is a deterrent. How can it deter the drug lords whose profession hangs a potential death penalty from there own ilk over their heads daily?
Mailer is the greatest American writer of the 20th century and Executioner's Song is one his strongest claims to that title.
Book Review: would deserve 4.5 stars - if it wasn't 1000+ pages
Summary: 3 Stars
i first read positive comments about this book in the introduction to art and laurie pepper's "straight life". (btw: a book i can only recommend!) i did a little research and checked some reviews here on amazon.com. through this research i found out about mikal gilmore's (yes, he is gary gilmore's brother) book "a shot in the heart". i first read that and was deeply moved and touched. i then went onto the book you are now trying to find out about. no doubt, the book is very good, mailer is a very solid writer, and i guess he did deserve the pulitzer prize for it. the story is at times amusing, funny, weird, unbelievable, mad... it takes you through all sorts ups and downs. the only thing i have a problem with is the fact that it is over 1000 pages! i can understand mailer wanted to be as accurate as possible, include as many facts and aspects as possible. but i personally feel that some bits should have been left out, just to make the book shorter. otherwise: definitely very good. if you are interested in gary gilmore and his story, but don't really dig books that are 1000+ pages, then i recommend you go for mikal gilmore's "a shot in the heart".