Point to Point Navigation
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Gore Vidal
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By:
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Gore Vidal
About this listen
In the Navy during World War II, Vidal was forced to use point to point navigation whenever compasses failed. It is an apt analogy for his life, which has been filled with glorious triumphs as well as spectacular controversies. Never afraid to enter uncharted waters, Vidal has had relationships with innumerable luminaries, including President Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Greta Garbo, and others.
Thoroughly engaging and, of course, provocative, Point to Point Navigation is the fascinating story of an American icon. Vidal himself narrates this memoir, intimately sharing the stories of his own life.
©2006 Gore Vidal (P)2006 Recorded Books LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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"In short, the memoir is a perfect encapsulation of Vidal's outsized personality." (Booklist)
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This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President - yet written with complete interpretive freedom - is as revolutionary in method as it is formidable in scholarship. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris developed a fascination for the genial yet inscrutable President and, after Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, put aside the second volume of his life of Roosevelt to become an observing eye and ear at the White House.
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Painful
- By john on 02-06-13
By: Edmund Morris
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Careless People
- Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of the Great Gatsby
- By: Sarah Churchwell
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 13 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby has become one of the world's best-loved books, delighting audiences across the world. Careless People tells the true story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, exploring in newly rich detail the relation of Fitzgerald's classic to the chaotic world he in which he lived. Fitzgerald set his novel in 1922, and Careless People carefully reconstructs the crucial months during which Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald returned to New York in the autumn of 1922.
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Fascinating study of the Fitzgeralds and Jazz Age
- By Sand on 06-11-14
By: Sarah Churchwell
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Eleanor and Hick
- The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady
- By: Susan Quinn
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1932 Eleanor Roosevelt entered the claustrophobic, duty-bound existence of the first lady with dread. By that time she had put her deep disappointment in her marriage behind her and developed an independent life - now threatened by the public role she would be forced to play. A lifeline came to her in the form of a feisty campaign reporter for the Associated Press: Lorena Hickok. Over the next 30 years, until Eleanor's death, the two women carried on an extraordinary relationship.
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An Icon who was real.
- By Francine Fields on 08-17-17
By: Susan Quinn
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She Made Me Laugh
- My Friend Nora Ephron
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Richard Cohen, wrote this about his "third-person memoir": "I call this book a third-person memoir. It is about my closest friend, Nora Ephron, and the lives we lived together and how her life got to be bigger until, finally, she wrote her last work, the play, Lucky Guy, about a newspaper columnist dying of cancer while she herself was dying of cancer. I have interviewed many of her other friends - Mike Nichols, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Arianna Huffington.
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Loved it!
- By Leigh Lerro on 10-27-17
By: Richard Cohen
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So We Read On
- How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
- By: Maureen Corrigan
- Narrated by: Maureen Corrigan
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power.
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Reading Gatsby as an adult reveals its greatness!
- By Mark on 10-06-14
By: Maureen Corrigan
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The Great Escape
- Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Anna Fields
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The stunning story of the breathtaking journey of nine extraordinary men from Budapest to the New World, what they experienced along their dangerous route, and how they changed America and the world. In a style both personal and historically groundbreaking, acclaimed author Kati Marton (born in Budapest) tells the tale of their youth in Budapest's Golden Age of the early 20th century, their flight, and their lives of extraordinary accomplishment, danger, glamour, and poignancy.
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very interesting, well-narrated
- By D. Littman on 12-17-06
By: Kati Marton
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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Without Lying Down
- By: Cari Beauchamp
- Narrated by: Holly Palance
- Length: 20 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from the early teens through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and remains the only woman to win two Academy Awards for original screenwriting (The Big House and The Champ).
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A Must Read
- By Robert Wallace on 03-19-19
By: Cari Beauchamp
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City Boy
- My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s
- By: Edmund White
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the New York of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult.
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Pretense upon pretense.
- By Shalin Desai on 06-01-15
By: Edmund White
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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Inga
- Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
- By: Scott Farris
- Narrated by: Scott Farris
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre.
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Excellent Kennedy Read
- By James P. Barraza on 04-14-17
By: Scott Farris
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Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.
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Finally! Vidal's Great Take on the Life of Burr
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Inventing a Nation
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Volumes have been written about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but no previous work captures the intimate and vital details the way Inventing a Nation does. Vidal's consummate skill takes you into the minds and private rooms of these great men, illuminating their opinions of one another and their concerns about crafting a workable democracy.
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Reader Beware: Mixed with a political agenda
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Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens - the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates - Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life’s journeys.
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A Magnificent Tour de Force
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Julian
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Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign.
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Brilliant narration!
- By Abhishek Deepak on 10-23-19
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United States: Essays 1952-1992
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Gore Vidal’s reputation as America’s finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov, and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992).
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An entertaining anthology & a superb narration
- By S&DH on 11-13-21
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Palimpsest
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This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters - including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
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Intelligent, Amusing
- By David M Chesser on 06-02-20
By: Gore Vidal
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Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.
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Finally! Vidal's Great Take on the Life of Burr
- By John Norton on 06-12-19
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Volumes have been written about George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, but no previous work captures the intimate and vital details the way Inventing a Nation does. Vidal's consummate skill takes you into the minds and private rooms of these great men, illuminating their opinions of one another and their concerns about crafting a workable democracy.
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Reader Beware: Mixed with a political agenda
- By Robert on 09-09-04
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Cyrus Spitama, grandson of the prophet Zoroaster and lifelong friend of Xerxes, spent most of his life as Persian ambassador for the great king Darius. He traveled to India, where he discussed nirvana with Buddha, and to the warring states of Cathay, where he learned of Tao from Master Li and fished on the riverbank with Confucius. Now blind and aged in Athens - the Athens of Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Socrates - Cyrus recounts his days as he strives to resolve the fundamental questions that have guided his life’s journeys.
-
-
A Magnificent Tour de Force
- By Harry Haller on 01-31-20
By: Gore Vidal
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Julian
- A Novel
- By: Gore Vidal
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Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign.
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Brilliant narration!
- By Abhishek Deepak on 10-23-19
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An entertaining anthology & a superb narration
- By S&DH on 11-13-21
By: Gore Vidal
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Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
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In a series of penetrating and alarming essays, whose centerpiece is a commentary on the events of September 11, 2001 (deemed then too controversial to publish), Gore Vidal challenges the comforting consensus following September 11th and goes back and draws connections to Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. He asks were these simply the acts of “evil-doers?”
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Gore Vidal Shits on Everything
- By Jeremy Hager on 01-17-20
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The City and the Pillar
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Jim, a handsome, all-American athlete, has always been shy around girls. But when he and his best friend, Bob, partake in “awful kid stuff,” the experience forms Jim’s ideal of spiritual completion. Defying his parents’ expectations, Jim strikes out on his own, hoping to find Bob and rekindle their amorous friendship.
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Do not listen to the introduction!!!!!
- By Billmatto on 12-05-19
By: Gore Vidal
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Messiah
- A Novel
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- Unabridged
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Messiah traces the collapse of Christianity and the rise of the next great religion of Western civilization: Cavism. Founded by undertaker John Cave, Cavism holds that it is a holy thing to die. Packaged by a marketing genius, the new religion conquers the world more quickly than any prior memeplex, but pockets of resistance remain. Eugene Luther, formerly an apostle of Cavism, now a hunted apostate, writes his memoirs as a last gesture of freedom while the noose of a totalitarian religious state tightens around him.
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A Really Well Read Story And Very Professional Audiobook
- By Frank Donnelly on 05-02-21
By: Gore Vidal
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The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
- By: Gore Vidal, Jay Parini - editor
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Gore Vidal - novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist - is America’s premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.
By: Gore Vidal, and others
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Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking
- Collected Sex Writings
- By: Gore Vidal, Donald Weise - editor
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking presents the author’s often provocative and always engaging thoughts on sexuality. Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac.
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If you won’t read his collected essays go for it.
- By Reckoning on 07-19-24
By: Gore Vidal, and others
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The Last Empire
- Essays 1992-2000
- By: Gore Vidal
- Narrated by: Dan Cashman
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The Last Empire is a collection of provocative, witty, and eloquent essays by Gore Vidal about all things USA. In more than two dozen essays, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of subjects, offering incisive observations about terrorism, civil liberties, the CIA, Al Gore, and the Clintons—interwoven with a rich tapestry of personal anecdote, critical insight, and historical detail.
By: Gore Vidal
What listeners say about Point to Point Navigation
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Glen W. Stinnett
- 04-12-15
A very articulate autobiography/memoir
A very articulate autobiography/memoir. I enjoyed many Gore books. Review complete.
Thanks to Audible Shop.
Glen W Stinnett
gwstnntt1@gmail.com
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- Daniel Rosen
- 10-25-14
Fascinating anecdotes from a master storyteller
Rich tales from a rich life are recalled by Vidal himself in this excellent collection.
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Overall
- Joyce Eriksen
- 03-31-15
Tongue in cheek
Mr Vidal is witty and wry. Love both so I'm a fan. He wouldn't care at all. One of a kind.
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- Joyce
- 08-13-13
Brilliant
Gore Vidal at the end of his long and over-the-top life, here exhibits his wisdom, his wit and his frustrations, as he settles old scores and drops many a name.
There is much to be learned from this too soon ended short account of a remarkable life.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Silverthorne
- 09-12-19
Depression made manifest
This is a very sad book by a wonderful writer who knows all about disillusionment, loss, betrayal, and bitterness. It made me very sad myself to hear it in his eighty-year old voice, sometimes hard to understand. Not a book for most readers, I would suspect, even those who admired and respected Vidal.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-21-23
Excellent and insightful memoir
Excellent and insightful memoir by one of the greatest writers of 20th century.
Highly recommended
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- margot
- 08-01-13
Digressive, like an old man's reveries
This memoir is not nearly as good as Vidal's 'Palimpsest,' which was a masterpiece of autobiography as well as witty social history. There were bits of exaggeration and maybe outright lies in the earlier book, but the ego is allowed poetic license.
In this volume the memories are running thin and they threaten to get maudlin. The lingering illness and death of Vidal's life-partner Howard Auster is a poignant tale, told with excellent reserve and no soppiness, but it does leave a big black cloud over the whole book.
On the other hand, we've got Gore Vidal himself reading the thing in his Mandarin drawl, and that blots out a multitude of sins. Gore revisits some of the favorites from the earlier memoir--Jack and Jackie, Tennessee Williams, his parents, Amelia Earhart--and brings them to life like Dickens giving a final-tour reading.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Jay Quintana
- 12-15-19
A Brisk Summing Up of One's Life
Vidal records his interactions with people and his memories of his younger days with wit, charm, and eloquence. He lived a full and eventful life. He seemingly knew everybody. The tone is surprisingly light, considering he is nearing the end. And for a man who once said, "it's not enough for me to succeed, others must fail," there is an absence of mean-spiritedness and the need to get even.
This is a quick, easy listen. Still, it is a little disappointing. For me, I know Vidal best from his contretemps with William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. None of that is covered here. And it ends not with his thoughts on life's meaning, but his views on the Kennedy assassination.
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Overall
- Catherine
- 06-02-08
Point to Point Navigation
Gore Vidal is a master of the memoir. His book is so entertaining and informative, I find myself going back again and again to listen. And you need not listen in order - you can just drop in at any point and it feels like you are listening to Gore recount memories directly to you over tea. Fascinating! Highly recommended.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Matt
- 03-19-15
Vidal is brilliant
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
And weird, but also touching and heartfelt. His biting, ironic self is there - but also a really vulnerable one that I didn't know existed, and that I think you could only access listening to this book. There's a lot of names dropped, but it's not gossipy at all. It's a lot of fun to listen to. It's personal, and political, and totally believable. It's this great kind of epitaph for a 19th century man who somehow made it all the way to the 21st century. I got the sense he could have lived his life as just another miserable prep school to Harvard to Law School to Alcohol and death nobody from the class of '43, but somehow he struck out on his own to become this immortal. The thing is - Vidal isn't even a liberal or democrat or whatever. He's just the last of what was the Republican party, and perhaps the last small-r republican. Anyway. The audiobook is fun. I enjoyed it. It was worth my time.
What did you like best about this story?
Gore's narration is brilliant and funny and lyrical. It's a pity Americans don't talk like that anymore.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
His description of his partner's death. It was really moving - and I got the sense that there was a hidden sadness there that he wasn't quite revealing.
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3 people found this helpful