POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION A Memoir, 1964 to 2006 By Gore Vidal Doubleday. 277 pp. $26 When I was growing up in Washington, WDCA-TV ran a weekly horror-flick showcase called "Creature Feature," hosted by Count Gore de Vol. The count was suave, fond of cheesy movies and inclined to plant his teeth in the nearest neck. In all these respects, he was the double of Gore Vidal, whose vampiric sang-froid has seen him through a long and bustling career of pamphleteerism and historical revisionism -- with plays, novels and screenplays thrown in for ballast. And if Vidal isn't technically speaking undead, there has always been something about his tireless stream of prose that seems unruffled by mortality. ... -
The Great Gadfly
POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION A Memoir, 1964 to 2006 By Gore Vidal Doubleday. 277 pp. $26 When I was growing up in Washington, WDCA-TV ran a weekly horror-flick showcase called "Creature Feature," hosted by Count Gore de Vol. The count was suave, fond of cheesy movies and inclined to plant his teeth in the nearest neck. In all these respects, he was the double of Gore Vidal, whose vampiric sang-froid has seen him through a long and bustling career of pamphleteerism and historical revisionism -- with plays, novels and screenplays thrown in for ballast. And if Vidal isn't technically speaking undead, there has always been something about his tireless stream of prose that seems unruffled by mortality. ...-
Reviewed by Louis Bayard