We are where we’ve been and what we’ve read, aren’t we? Where else do we get the experience we need to evocatively live?

At once a memoir, a reading journal, and a novel, Fragments of a Mortal Mind is a daring, contemporary commonplace book. Donald Anderson, critically acclaimed author of Gathering Noise from My Life and Below Freezing, shows us how the disparate elements of our lives collect to construct our deepest selves and help us to make sense of it all. Anderson layers his personal experiences and reflections with those of others who have wrestled with inner and outer social, cultural, and political memories that are not as accurate as history might suggest but that each of us believe nonetheless. He challenges the reader’s sense of memory and fact, downplaying the latter in explaining how each of us crafts our own personal histories.

As Anderson weaves his voice among numerous other voices and ideas that rest upon other ideas, we are faced with larger issues of human existence: war, memory, trauma, mortality, religion, fear, joy, ugliness, and occasional beauty. What we have here is a meditation on living in America. We are shown how the world we consume becomes us as we metabolize it. How we, as humans, through our own fragments of memories, influences, and experiences become our true selves. By charting fragments of thoughts over a lifetime, Anderson exposes a way of thinking and perceiving the world that is refreshingly intuitive and desperately needed. Fragments of a Mortal Mind is a powerful masterpiece that closely resembles our lived experiences and is a vivid reflection of our time.
 

Donald Anderson is the author of Gathering Noise from My Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, named by the Christian Science Monitor as one of "12 Electrifying Memoirs" appearing in 2012 and Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet, listed among "The Best Books About Climate Change of 2018" by the Chicago Review of Books. His fiction and essays have appeared in The North American Review, Fiction International, Epoch, PRISM international, Western Humanities Review, Columbia, Michigan Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, and elsewhere. Since 1989, he's been editor of War, Literature & the Arts. A former Air Force officer, he now lives in Colorado, where he directs creative writing at the United States Air Force Academy.