Gore Vidal: Point to Point Provocateur — NEW BOOK: ‘Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006’
NEW BOOK: ‘Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006’
AUSTIN Gore Vidal the inimitable raconteur, essayist, novelist, playwright, historian, critic, and screenwriter was in public conversation with Maureen Dowd at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 29, as part of the Texas Book Festival, where his new book, “Point to Point Navigation, A Memoir from 1964 to 2006,” that is due in bookstores Nov. 7 was highlighted. Published by Doubleday, the memoir is a sequel to his acclaimed, bestselling “Palimpsest.”
Noted in several venues, from literature to politics to entertainment, Vidal is considered an American icon.
In “Point to Point,” Vidal ranges freely over his life experiences 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.
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.”
From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal, in “Point to Point,” travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics, and international society where he has cut a broad swath. Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages are Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Greta Garbo, Paul Newman, Johnny Carson, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Princess Margaret, Elia Kazan, Francis Ford Coppola, Grace Kelly, Paul Bowles
