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Point to Point Navigation

A Memoir

By Gore Vidal

(3)

| Hardcover | 9780385517218

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Book Description

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 literaryContinue

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.

Critics

  • Leave-Taking

    TO describe this collection of fragments as a valediction would apparently be in accordance with the author's wishes. Nearly every page is heavy — I almost said "gravid"—with intimations of mortality . It's closing time at the Vidal villa in Ravello, ... (read full critics)

    nytimes published on Sat, 18 Sep 2010

  • Around the world in 80 years

    Two summers ago at La Rondinaia, during one of those last evenings before he flew from his sky-high eyrie for the last time, Gore Vidal advised me to read the 19th-century memoirist Augustus Hare’s The Story of my Life, an author with whom he felt gr ... (read full critics)

    spectator published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

1 Review

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  • when i picked this book up at the library, it was just that vague idea of him being a known person. once reading thru few pages i am in awe, this person is so full of stories, legends, life, love, and humour towards life. then i am fascinated at how good looking gore vidal was when he was young; th ... (continue)

    when i picked this book up at the library, it was just that vague idea of him being a known person. once reading thru few pages i am in awe, this person is so full of stories, legends, life, love, and humour towards life. then i am fascinated at how good looking gore vidal was when he was young; then again at how he became more and more attractive and charismatic as he aged.
    i could not imagine what life is like being him now (eighty plus), experiencing so much, his love has gone and he himself is counting the days as he gone thru. there were only few mentionings/chapters, but his relationship he and his life partner howard austen is so heartening.

    Gore vidal is such a big person, he has so many talents, it is so dazzling to know such a person, let alone reading his memoirs he is a proud person, yet his writing his view have the earthy side too.
    he is over eighty he is still acute, and towering the world and life. admire him.

    Is this helpful?

    helyip said on Aug 1, 2009 | Add your feedback

Book Details

  • Rating:
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 288 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 0385517211
  • ISBN-13: 9780385517218
  • Publisher: Doubleday
  • Pub date: Nov 07, 2006
  • Dimensions: 1484 mm x 1032 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
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