All about Gore Vidal and his friends (and those he didn't like, too)

books:


	• Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (Vintage) Gore Vidal Vintage, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Patriotic Gore

It sounds funny to say this about a writer who has had as long and successful a career as Gore Vidal, but there are times I suspect that he is the most under/rated of our writers: He is quite simply a master novelist and the finest writer of essays of the last half century. Point To Point Navigation is a lovely, understated summing up of a long and varied life. If one cares about effortless prose- and a clear-eyed overview of the last few deacdes, you owe it to yourself to read P To P Navigation.

All about Gore Vidal and his friends (and those he didn't like, too)

D. In listening to Gore Vidal's second memoir, POINT TO POINT
NAVIGATION, I was immediately struck by how much
name-dropping seems to be taking place . . . his list of friends
and acquaintances reads like a Who's Who of important people
in the 20th century . . . it includes such notables as Tennessee Williams,
Johnny Carson, Rudolph Nuryev, Eleanor Roosevelt,
Paul Newman, Orson Welles, JFK, Princess Grace, Amelia Earhart,
and Gretta Garbo, just to name a few.

Many of these individuals he liked . . . in listening to this book, which he
also narrated, you get to know them better . . . if he didn't like
you (think Truman Capote), watch out . . . he wrote about him and even
his own mother in quite unpleasant terms.

I generally tend to prefer a book that follows a more linear
fashion . . . POINT TO POINT skipped around a bit too much
to my liking, though Vidal explains his reasoning for doing so
by mentioning the fact that he was forced to utilize this means
of navigation whenever compasses failed when he was in the
navy during World War II.

Vidal has written some 46 books, as well as numerous
essays . . . you'll get a better feel for his life by reading
this memoir, though it was actually his moving account
of his companion-for more than half a century--Howard Auster--that
I found most interesting.

They met on Labor Day in 1950 . . . years later, Auster told
Vidal "that he thought he was just passing through my life and was
surprised as the decades began to stack up and we were still together.
But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and
impossible, I have observed, when it does. Each had a sex life apart from
the other: all else including our sovereign, time, was shared."

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not palimpsest

Yes there's the charm, the wit, the astonishing offhand stories about his friendships with a diverse crowd of 20th century legends, but in a nutshell: read Palimpsest instead! He actually repeats a couple stories from that book here. A few good new stories, but not many. If you have already read Palimpsest, this is something of an addendum.

Maybe

Ok, so I read palimsest nearly..yes it could be a decade ago as a student. I bought Point when I wa scasually shopping last year. Vidal amazes in his clarity and liberal views. A true independent in all spheres!

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Point to Point Navigation

A poignant, if somewhat rambling, stroll through the latter half of Gore Vidal's extrodinary life.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

In a witty and elegant autobiography that takes up where his bestelling Palimpsest left off, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal reflects on his remarkable life.

Writing from his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society where he has cut a wide swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and sometimes lost). From encounters with, amongst others, Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Francis Ford Coppola to the mournful passing of his longtime partner, Howard Auster, Vidal always steers his narrative with grace and flair. Entertaining, provocative, and often moving, Point to Point Navigation wonderfully captures the life of one of twentieth-century America?s most important writers.

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