Mikal Gilmore Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mikal Gilmore is an American published author. He was born in the U.S. on February 9, 1951. He was born with the name Michael Gilmore but would change the spelling of it later on.

His brother Gary was a convicted murderer and in 1977 would be the first person executed after the death penalty was reinstated that year. He was executed for his crime of shooting two young Mormons in cold blood. He was executed officially by way of firing squad in Utah.

His 1995 memoir Shot in the Heart goes into the details of his relationship with Gary as well as their troubled family. This begins with the original Mormon settlers and goes all the way through to Gary’s execution and what happened after. The book got positive reviews, including a comment in USA Today that the book was one of the most beautifully written nonfiction books published in the past five years. It would also receive a Los Angeles Times Book Prize as well as a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gilmore has been interested in music for a long time. In the early seventies, he started writing articles for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1999, his chronology Night Beat: A Shadow of Rock and Roll was released by Anchor. He would go on to write more books about music, including Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents, and The Winding Road: The Real Story Behind the Breakup of the Beatles.

Stories Done: Writings on the 1960s and Its Discontents is a 2008 book by Mikal Gilmore. If you are interested in music and enjoy a certain era of music, then you’ll want to check it out and see what you think!

The sixties and the seventies were representative of a rare moment in the history of our culture. Music was going into unprecedented territories, literature was going through a radical reinvention at the time, politics were polarizing the people of the nation, and youth culture was reaching the peak of its influence.

There has not been and will not likely be another generation to come along that will be able to match the contributions that artists for that time period. In this book, Mikal Gilmore takes a journalistic look to put together a narrative of this time period as he takes a look at the lives of some of the most important cultural icons of this era.

In this book, Gilmore keeps the power of rock and roll front and center as he puts together stories to share with the reader all about huge artists from every field, such as Johnny Cash, George Harrison, Allen Ginsberg, and more.

The author shows the truth about this period in history that is so often idealized, but doesn’t stay away from the influences that unfortunately had a negative impact on many of the stars of the era. He takes a closer look at instances such as alcoholism bringing Jim Morrison to an early grave at the age of twenty-seven, how Jerry Garcia and his drug issues nearly killed him so often that his band mates did not initially believe the news that he had passed, or how Pink Floyd contended with the guilt of kicking out Syd Barrett due to his mental illness.

Gilmore goes into the dark side of many of these figures and their lives, while also putting together a picture of the environment that helped to create them, going to the streets of Liverpool to Haight-Ashbury, the location for the famous summer of love.

What came out of those times and those lives, puts forth the author, was worth all of the inherent risk and is quite difficult to separate from those high costs. The lives of these figures are all put together with the author’s exploration of the various characteristics that helped to define this era, from the emotional to political and social. This is an interesting in depth look at what remains one of the most, if not the most, formative times that the United States has ever seen. Grab a copy of this book to check out Mikal Gilmore’s insightful portrait of the sixties and seventies for yourself!

The Winding Road: The Real Story Behind the Breakup of the Beatles is a 2011 book from Mikal Gilmore. Whether you are the ultimate Beatles fan or are just interested in this topic and this time from one of the biggest super groups to ever hit the music scene, give this book a try and find out things about this time and this group that you have never known before!

This book is based on over a thousand pages of notes and research into this topic that has never before been done to put together an incredible portrait of the breakup of the Beatles and to date is the most put together and complete version of this story told to date.

It all started with the August 2009 release of an issue of Rolling Stone magazine, in which Gilmore penned a piece that gained so much traffic that it became one of the top emailed articles of the magazine’s website. Inside it, the author put forth completely new information on the breakup of the most famous rock band of the 20th century and their breakup in 1970.

Music fans and aficionados will be thrilled to find that article expanded in The Winding Road, a book where the author goes even further into the topic and puts forth a completely new look at this time in music history. While John Lennon was known to refer to the conclusion of the band as a ‘divorce’, Gilmore instead comes to the conclusion that what did happen in fact was potentially a maneuver by John Lennon that went wrong.

The author puts together the stories of these four musicians who changed the way that popular music was forever, even as their different personalities and the impact of the popularity of the band worked together to eventually destroy what they had put so much effort into creating.

Putting together decades of interviews and tons of research, The Winding Road is a detailed look at the Beatles and what made them great as well as what led to their demise. Read it yourself to go along for the ride and find out more yourself about this famed group in this intriguing tome from Mikal Gilmore.