This Living Hand

December 3, 2012
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.

Starred review from October 1, 2012
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.

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