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Point to Point Navigation
Gore Vidal
A Memoir
Doubleday
November 2006
On Sale: November 7, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0385517211
EAN: 9780385517218
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
The brilliant sequel to Gore Vidal’s acclaimed, bestselling
memoir, Palimpsest. In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist,
essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges
freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and
literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to
a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the
Navy during World War II. As he says, “As I was writing this
account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if
I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the
Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass
made inoperable by weather.” It is a beautifully apt analogy
for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and
for the way this memoir proceeds—far from linear but always
on course. From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore
Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature,
television, film, theater, politics and international
society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting
achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a
number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables
to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease
and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs,
are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the
“Glorious Bird”), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny
Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia
Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book’s most
moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his
partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book
is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in
the spirit of Montaigne. Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, Point to Point Navigation
is a summing-up of Gore Vidal’s time on the planet that
manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly
provocative, and thoroughly moving.
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