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If the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who creates with equivalent virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers advised him, "You might have the most valuable gift of all - originality." That quality is abundantly obvious in this collection of essays. They cover 40 years in the life of an maverick intellectual who are able to be, at whim, astonishingly provocative, self-mockingly funny, and richly anecdotal. (The title essay, a tribute to Reagan in cognitive drop, is poignant in the extreme.) Whether Morris is examining images of Barack Obama or the prose style of Chief executive Clinton, or checking out the riches of the brand new York Public Collection Boogie Collection, or interviewing the novelist Nadine Gordimer, or proposing a amusing "Diet for the Musically Obese", a continuing cross-fertilization is going on in his mind. It mixes the cultural pollens of Africa, Britain, and the United States, and propogates cross blooms - some fragrant, some odd, some a great shock to typical sensibilities. Regularly in This Living Palm, Morris celebrates the physicality of creative labor, and laments the cup screen that today's e-devices interpose between inspiration and execution. No presidential biographer has ever endured so literary a "take" on his subjects: He discerns forces of poetic conception even in the obsessively methodical Edison. Nor do most authors on music have verbal center to articulate, as Morris does, what it is about certain does sound that soothe the savage breast. His essay on the pathology of Beethoven's deafness breaks new earth in recommending that tinnitus may describe some of the weird aural effects in that composer's works. Masterly monographs on the art work of biography, South Africa in the last days and nights of apartheid, the romance of the piano, and the role of thoughts in nonfiction are juxtaposed with enchanting, almost unclassifiable items such as "The Bumstitch: Lament for a Ignored Berries" (Morris suspects it may have become in your garden of Eden); "The Anticapitalist Conspiracy: A Caution" (an assault on The Chicago Manual of Style); "Nuages Gris: Colors in Music, Books, and Skill"; and the uproarious "Which Way Does indeed Sir Dress?", about purchasing a suit from the most expensive tailor in London. This Living Palm 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 ignored information whom Morris lovingly restores to "life". Among they are the pianist Ferruccio Busoni, the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist Wayne Gould Cozzens, and 16 so-called "Undistinguished Americans", contributors to an anthology of anonymous memoirs printed in 1902. Reviewing that publication for The New Yorker, Morris notes that even the most unlettered people have, on occasion, "power to send forth delight flashes, illuminating not only the deep around them but also more sophisticated shadows - for example, those cast by public figures who'll not acknowledge to private failings, or by philosophers too cerebral to convey a plain truth." The author of This Living Palm is no standard person, but he too transmits forth delight flashes, never more dazzlingly than in his last essay, "The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography".