The noise gathered from a lifetime of engaging with war, race, religion, memory, illness, and family echoes through the vignettes, quotations, graffiti, and poetry that Donald Anderson musters here, fragments of the humor and horror of life, the absurdities that mock reason and the despair that yields laughter. Gathering Noise from My Life offers sonic shards of a tune at once jaunty and pessimistic, hopeful and hopeless, and a model for how we can make sense of the scraps of our lives. "We are where we've been and what we've read," the author says, and gives us his youth in Montana, the family tradition of boxing, careers in writing and fighting, the words of Mike Tyson, Frederick the Great, Fran Lebowitz, and Shakespeare. In his camouflaged memoir, the award-winning short-story writer cobbles together the sources of the vision of life he has accrued as a consequence of his six decades of living and reading.
About the Author: Donald Anderson is a professor of English and Writer in Residence at the U.S. Air Force Academy. The editor of the journal War, Literature and the Arts, he has published several books, including Fire Road (Iowa, 2001), which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and the edited collections When War Becomes Personal: Soldiers' Accounts from the Civil War to Iraq (Iowa, 2008), Andre Dubus: Tributes, and aftermath: an anthology of post-vietnam fiction. At the invitation of the National Endowment for the Arts, he served on the panel that selected the contributions to Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families.
