on the mAP.(Point to Point Navigation)(Brief article)(Book review)

Byline: Taylor Antrim

Despite the subtitle, Gore Vidal's engaging new memoir, Point to Point Navigation (Doubleday), is not a complete account of the years 1964 to 2006. We hear next to nothing about his best-selling novels

of the period (Myra Breckinridge, Burr, Lincoln), only brief mentions of his two congressional campaigns, and hardly a word about 1968's famous televised dustup with William F. Buckley, Jr. Rather, like 1995's Palimpsest, this is a hopscotch tour through the writer's political, celebrity, and literary circles, delivered with

the biting wit and playful self-admiration ("Contrary

to legend, I was born of mortal woman . . . ") for which Vidal is known. Having lived, as he puts it, through about one-third of the nation's history, Vidal seems to have met everyone: Susan Sontag, Johnny Carson, Paul Newman, Francis Ford Coppola, Federico Fellini, Greta Garbo, Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, Rudolf Nureyev-and of course the Kennedys, to whom he is ...