Snapshots in History’s Glare
Gore Vidal
256 pages • Harry N. Abrams, Inc. • November 2nd, 2009 [HB]
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Snapshots in History’s Glare is a beautiful book of photographs accompanied by the urbane and sardonic commentary that one would expect from Gore Vidal. It is the fourth venture into autobiography from a writer who for most of his career asserted, “I am not my own subject”. The first of these, Screening History, started out as a series of lectures at Harvard. “My life has paralleled, when not intersected, the entire history of the talking picture,” Vidal observes in this remarkable book, the first part of which is reproduced in the early chapters of his second memoir, Point to Point Navigation, on the grounds that it is now out of print. Screening History is about how reality is filtered through the media, whether it be cinema, television or print, and in looking at this through the lens of his autobiography Vidal produced an unique analysis. In Palimpsest, and its sequel, Point to Point Navigation, Vidal followed the more traditional path of the memoirist, and now in Snapshots in History’s Glare he provides the photographic accompaniment that was somewhat missing from the earlier ventures.

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Tagged: fred kaplan, gore vidal, howard auster, palimpsest, playboy, point to point navigation, screening history, snapshots in history's glare