War is not to be envied

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana.

Given a setting in which rugged individualism is a generational mantle, it is not surprising that much of the ‘camouflaged’ memoir is about Anderson’s relationship with both his Dad and the more shadowy figure of his Grandfather:

‘When my father was a kid, he watched his father defeat a local tough. In a ring in the Butte Civic Center, my grandfather stepped through the ropes in his work shoes and stripped off his shirt.