Synopses & Reviews
< p=""> < b=""> The brilliant sequel to Gore Vidal& #8217; s acclaimed, bestselling memoir, < i=""> Palimpsest<> .< br=""> <> < br=""> In < i=""> 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, & #8220; As I was writing this account of my life and times since < i=""> 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.& #8221; It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds& #8212; far from linear but always on course.< br=""> 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& #8217; s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the & #8220; Glorious Bird& #8221; ), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book& #8217; s most moving pages are devoted to theillness 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.< br=""> Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, < i=""> Point to Point Navigation<> is a summing-up of Gore Vidal& #8217; s time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative, and thoroughly moving.<>
About the Author
Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded memoir, Palimpsest. Vidal's United States (Essays 1952-92) won the 1993 National Book Award. Vidal lives in Beverly Hills, California.