This Living Hand: And Other Essays

by Edmund Morris Narrated by Edmund Morris

Overview

When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, “You have the most precious gift of all-originality.” That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover forty years in the life of a maverick intellectual who can be, at whim, astonishingly provocative, self-mockingly funny, and richly anecdotal. (The title essay, a tribute to Reagan in cognitive decline, is poignant in the extreme.)
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Whether Morris is analyzing images of Barack Obama or the prose style of President Clinton, or exploring the riches of the New York Public Library Dance Collection, or interviewing the novelist Nadine Gordimer, or proposing a hilarious “Diet for the Musically Obese,” a continuous cross-fertilization is going on in his mind. It mixes the cultural pollens of Africa, Britain, and the United States, and* propogates hybrid flowers-some fragrant, some strange, some a shock to conventional sensibilities.
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Repeatedly in This Living Hand, Morris celebrates the physicality of artistic labor, and laments the glass screen that today's e-devices interpose between inspiration and execution. No presidential biographer has ever had so literary a “take” on his subjects: he discerns powers of poetic perception even in the obsessively scientific Edison. Nor do most writers on music have the verbal facility to articulate, as Morris does, what it is about certain sounds that soothe the savage breast. His essay on the pathology of Beethoven's deafness breaks new ground in suggesting that tinnitus may explain some of the weird aural effects in that composer's works. Masterly monographs on the art of biography, South Africa in the last days of apartheid, the romance of the piano, and the role of imagination in nonfiction are juxtaposed with enchanting, almost unclassifiable pieces such as “The Bumstitch: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit” (Morris suspects it may have grown in the Garden of Eden); “The Anticapitalist Conspiracy: A Warning” (an assault on The Chicago Manual of Style); “Nuages Gris: Colors in Music, Literature, and Art”; and the uproarious “Which Way Does Sir Dress?”, about ordering a suit from the most expensive tailor in London.
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Uniquely illustrated with images that the author describes as indispensable to his creative process, This Living Hand is packed with biographical insights into such famous personalities as Daniel Defoe, Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh,* Truman Capote, Glenn Gould, Jasper Johns, W. G. Sebald, and Winnie the Pooh-not to mention a gallery of forgotten figures whom Morris lovingly restores to “life.” Among these are the pianist Ferruccio Busoni, the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James Gould Cozzens, and sixteen so-called “Undistinguished Americans,” contributors to an anthology of anonymous memoirs published in 1902.
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Reviewing that book for The New Yorker, Morris notes that even the most unlettered persons have, on occasion, “power to send forth surprise flashes, illuminating not only the dark around them but also more sophisticated shadows-for example, those cast by public figures who will not admit to private failings, or by philosophers too cerebral to state a plain truth.” The author of This Living Hand is not an ordinary person, but he too sends forth surprise flashes, never more dazzlingly than in his final essay, “The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography.”

Editorial Reviews

JANUARY 2013 - AudioFile

Edmund Morris has written some of the most important biographies of the past 40 years, on subjects ranging from Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt to Ludwig von Beethoven. He’s also written essays and articles that were thoughtful, lucid, funny, and intelligent. This collection shows off his best, and qualifies as good history and engaging writing. Morris delivers his own book, and while he interprets his words well, his voice is not a natural choice for narration. It has a gravelly, scratchy timbre that can be difficult to follow at times, especially for 10 hours, and he tends to swallow some words at the beginnings of sentences. Otherwise, he reads with feeling and paces himself well, and we get the benefit of a great author interpreting his words. That makes this book worthwhile. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

This wide-ranging and mostly excellent collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and essayist Morris draws from four decades of writing. His topics range from the Romantic imagination to an unusual and extraordinary fruit know as a bumstitch. He has a strong historical bent, and many of the essays are quite nostalgic in tone. Morris' preface helps defuse some of the more dated moments, such as an uncomfortable elision of his Kenyan upbringing's colonial context and a reference to "feminine humor," by noting that he has largely refrained from making revisions, thereby allowing us to see him as he is or "was." Morris's prose is precise and engaging; his wit and thoughtfulness make for lively and often moving reading. As many will remember from his Reagan biography, Dutch, he tends to play fast and loose with the nonfiction form, here imagining conversations with deceased presidents and inserting himself into events he couldn't have attended or that could never have occurred at all. This brand of playfulness does not diminish the collection's seriousness of purpose. The essays are a pleasure, with the mixture of humor and intellect you'd hope for in an especially well-read dinner companion. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

Effortless, hasty, tasty, autobiographical, strange, surprising, twisting, graceful, rich, beautiful, haunting, and devastating.”—The Daily Beast
 
“A sterling collection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner . . . a splendid assemblage of significant work by one of our keenest observers.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Morris’s prose is precise and engaging; his wit and thoughtfulness make for lively and often moving reading.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Merrily perverse . . . fascinating . . . His final [essay] turns out to be a near-classic overview of civilization’s long and complex contrapuntal interplay between imagination and fact.”—Buffalo News

“A revealing and rewarding glimpse as to how a gifted writer has been able, in his own words, to ‘cut some of his brightest jewels from the raw rubble of experience.’”—The Washington Times
 
“A masterful exposition of English prose . . . Morris does for words what George Frideric Handel did for musical notes.”—The Roanoke Times

JANUARY 2013 - AudioFile

Edmund Morris has written some of the most important biographies of the past 40 years, on subjects ranging from Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt to Ludwig von Beethoven. He’s also written essays and articles that were thoughtful, lucid, funny, and intelligent. This collection shows off his best, and qualifies as good history and engaging writing. Morris delivers his own book, and while he interprets his words well, his voice is not a natural choice for narration. It has a gravelly, scratchy timbre that can be difficult to follow at times, especially for 10 hours, and he tends to swallow some words at the beginnings of sentences. Otherwise, he reads with feeling and paces himself well, and we get the benefit of a great author interpreting his words. That makes this book worthwhile. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

A sterling collection of essays from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner. Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, in "what amounts to a scrapbook of one man's literary life," the book ranges widely in tone from the serious to the satirical. Several of the works have yet to be published, and a few have been revised or expanded. Morris (Colonel Roosevelt, 2010, etc.), who writes that he is haunted by visual images, occasionally pairs a pertinent illustration with an essay and when necessary, inserts a footnote to clarify an obsolete reference. "Outside of literature in general and biography in particular," he writes, "my non-book work has consisted mainly of commentary on the presidency and writings about classical music." Morris begins with a 1972 essay, "The Bumstich: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit," in which he recounts his time as a schoolboy in Kenya. The author concludes with "The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography," an exploration of the process of writing Dutch (1999), his controversial book about Ronald Reagan. This last essay is an updated revision of three seminars the author gave while serving as a writer in residence at the University of Chicago in 2003. In other pieces, Morris laments the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro; probes the psyche of South African writer Nadine Gordimer; explains his passion for writing biographies; narrates his tour through Britain's Imperial War Museum; and bemoans the loss of the physical pleasure of writing with pen and ink or typewriter. "Parker man or Remington man," he writes, "one felt a closeness to the finished product that the glass screen of a computer display now coldly precludes." A splendid assemblage of significant work by one of our keenest observers.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172136634
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/23/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

THE BUMSTITCH
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "This Living Hand"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Edmund Morris.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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