Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival [Paperback]

Anderson Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2007

Few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict around the world than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has changed the way we watch the news. In this gripping, candid, and remarkably powerful memoir, he offers an unstinting, up-close view of the most harrowing crises of our time, and the profound impact they have had on his life.

After growing up on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Cooper felt a magnetic pull toward the unknown, an attraction to the far corners of the earth. If he could keep moving, and keep exploring, he felt he could stay one step ahead of his past, including the fame surrounding his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the tragic early deaths of his father and older brother. As a reporter, the frenetic pace of filing dispatches from war-torn countries, and the danger that came with it, helped him avoid having to look too closely at the pain and loss that was right in front of him.

But recently, during the course of one extraordinary, tumultuous year, it became impossible for him to continue to separate his work from his life, his family's troubled history from the suffering people he met all over the world. From the tsunami in Sri Lanka to the war in Iraq to the starvation in Niger and ultimately to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi, Cooper gives us a firsthand glimpse of the devastation that takes place, both physically and emotionally, when the normal order of things is violently ruptured on such a massive scale. Cooper had been in his share of life-threatening situations before -- ducking fire on the streets of war-torn Sarejevo, traveling on his own to famine-stricken Somalia, witnessing firsthand the genocide in Rwanda -- but he had never seen human misery quite like this. Writing with vivid memories of his childhood and early career as a roving correspondent, Cooper reveals for the first time how deeply affected he has been by the wars, disasters, and tragedies he has witnessed, and why he continues to be drawn to some of the most perilous places on earth.

Striking, heartfelt, and utterly engrossing, Dispatches from the Edge is an unforgettable memoir that takes us behind the scenes of the cataclysmic events of our age and allows us to see them through the eyes of one of America's most trusted, fearless, and pioneering reporters.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 2005, two tragedies--the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina--turned CNN reporter Anderson Cooper into a media celebrity. Dispatches from the Edge, Cooper's memoir of "war, disasters and survival," is a brief but powerful chronicle of Cooper's ascent to stardom and his struggle with his own tragedies and demons. Cooper was 10 years old when his father, Wyatt Cooper, died during heart bypass surgery. He was 20 when his beloved older brother, Carter, committed suicide by jumping off his mother's penthouse balcony (his mother, by the way, being Gloria Vanderbilt). The losses profoundly affected Cooper, who fled home after college to work as a freelance journalist for Channel One, the classroom news service. Covering tragedies in far-flung places like Burma, Vietnam, and Somalia, Cooper quickly learned that "as a journalist, no matter ... how respectful you are, part of your brain remains focused on how to capture the horror you see, how to package it, present it to others." Cooper's description of these horrors, from war-ravaged Baghdad to famine-wracked Niger, is poignant but surprisingly unsentimental. In Niger, Cooper writes, he is chagrined, then resigned, when he catches himself looking for the "worst cases" to commit to film. "They die, I live. It's the way of the world," he writes. In the final section of Dispatches, Cooper describes covering Hurricane Katrina, the story that made him famous. The transcript of his showdown with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (in which Cooper tells Landrieu people in New Orleans are "ashamed of what is happening in this country right now") is worth the price of admission on its own. Cooper's memoir leaves some questions unanswered--there's frustratingly little about his personal life, for example--but remains a vivid, modest self-portrait by a man who is proving himself to be an admirable, courageous leader in a medium that could use more like him. --Erica C. Barnett --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Most listeners will already be familiar with Anderson Cooper's dangerous field reporting on CNN. While this autobiography is heavy with those tales of wars and natural disasters, it is also rife with a surprising number of very personal incidents and revelations. His straightforward reading of his on-camera adventures is clear and engaging. But what keeps this reading from being great is his detachment. Perhaps because he has spent his professional life trying to be objective in his role as a journalist (although it could be argued that he became a media star when that facade cracked during his coverage of Hurricane Katrina) the more personal bits of the book are spoken with a level of distance that doesn't quite match up with the subject matter, especially when dealing with such delicate personal issues as his feelings concerning the suicide of his brother. Anderson is a sensational writer and reporter, but this mixture of public and private dispatches would have more power if he'd let his professional persona slip more.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (May 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061451517
• ISBN-13: 978-0061136689
• ASIN: 0061136689
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (250 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #62 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Current Events > Disaster Relief

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

178 of 195 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave memoir, May 23, 2006

By 

P. Smith (Northeast) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Hardcover)

Too often, those we see on television are packaged into a personality that is devoid of inner demons- everything is slick and beautiful. Anderson Cooper lets us inside of the pain in his life and his imperfections and the road he has travelled in dealing with his demons. Of course, we also read about the man we see on television- deeply caring and willing to ask the very hard questions in any situation. I admire Mr. Cooper for his honesty about the inner turmoils of his life and the truly sincere caring he brings to every story he covers. And for those who think he is on an ego trip talking about his wounded youth- wake up! Our pasts are a deeply ingrained part of every one of us and sometimes we do not integrate the pain of a wounded childhood until we are adults and in Anderson's case until he has witnessed the most obscene of suffering on this earth. Kudos- a very well written first book from Mr. Cooper.

161 of 186 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Where In The World Is Anderson Cooper?, May 26, 2006

By 

prisrob "pris," (New England USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dispatches from the Edge CD (Audio CD)

Anderson Cooper tells us how he came about to write a book, "All this came about for me in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and I started writing about a week after. In many ways, I'd been sort of writing it in my head for the last 15 years. But there was something about this sort of combination of the present that I was seeing, this horror and this tragedy, and the bravery and the compassion of the people I was meeting. I was surrounded by all these moments from my past, he said. My father had lived in New Orleans. My father had grown up in Mississippi. I had been there with him as a child and he had died when I was very young. It was sort of this joining the past and present and I just started writing, and it sort of flowed from there."

Cooper's father was writer Wyatt Cooper, and his mother is Gloria Vanderbilt. A family of fame and fortune, and he grew up in a privileged home. When he was ten his father died from complications of cardiac surgery. He writes about his relationship with his brother. They loved each other, but never really discussed their father's death. It just was. And, later on, his brother committed suicide by jumping from his mother's apartment in NYC. Both of these events would be difficult to deal with, and they were for Anderson. But, he has some trouble relating his emotions as he admits. This book is helping to open up old wounds. Death he can relate to, and he has seen it all over the world. In fact he sometimes jumps from one corner of the world to another so quickly in this book, you wonder just where he is. "Where In The World Is Anderson Cooper? Anderson survived his father and brother's death and went to college at Yale. He graduated and could not find a job in broadcasting, his chosen field. His mother's name made no difference in this world, and, so, he went out into the world and made his life his own by meeting people and writing their stories. Eventually he landed a job at ABC covering the overnight news and reporting for 20/20. He was then given his own show "The Mole", and this is where he was "discovered". Anderson Cooper is a now a journalist of reknown, and he has a 2 hour show on CNN called "360". His time at CNN has been meteoric, and his emotional delivery while covering Hurricane Katrina made him a star. He is admired and respected as a journalist, and he has a down to earth delivery. A youngish charm that belies his silvery grey hair.

Anderson Cooper does not talk about his personal life in this book. Much has been speculated and written about him. It is his right not to disclose his sexual orientation, and we should leave it at that. He has little time for a personal life he tells us. Friends hear that old refrain " sorry,working". What he does discuss is his philosophy of journalism, and the fact that he volunteers to work on New Years Eve. It relieves him of doing anything social. He remembers a New Years Eve watching TV with his brother when his father was in the hospital.

"I've always hated New Year's Eve. When I was ten, I lay on the floor of my room with my brother, watching on TV as the crowd in Times Square counted down the remaining seconds of 1977. My father was in the intensive care unit at New York Hospital. He'd had a series of heart attacks, and in a few days would undergo bypass surgery. My brother and I were terrified, but too scared to speak with each other about it. We watched, silent, numb, as the giant crystal ball made its slow descent. It all seemed so frightening: the screaming crowds, the frigid air, not knowing if our father would live through the new year"

Anderson Cooper reminds me of the old time great journalists who put their heart and soul into their reporting and stories. He is someone we can relate to and trust. Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite. And, he has a new additional job, correspondent for "60 Minutes". This is a show he has always wanted to do, and he says "I hope I don't screw up". Go get'em Anderson, you have got us hooked. You won't screw up, we have Faith. Recommended. prisrob 5-26-06

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Really 360 Degrees But a Sharp and Swift Memoir of a Reporter on the Rise, May 24, 2006

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Hardcover)

Deemed by CNN programming executive Jonathan Klein as the "anchorperson of the future", Anderson Cooper has experienced the type of meteoric rise that is bound to draw critical diatribes as well as hosannas. Based on personal journals he has kept, his newly published book will unlikely shift opinions drastically, but this relatively brief memoir does provide an intriguing, sometimes poignant portrait of a man who let his natural curiosity of the world fester into a career in television journalism. As the son of writer Wyatt Cooper and heiress/blue jean magnate Gloria Vanderbilt, he was a child of privilege. At the same time, he was driven to find his own identity in light of deep personal tragedies, which by far, provide the most absorbing passages in his book.

His father died during open heart surgery at the age of fifty, and a decade later in 1988, his brother Carter jumped off the balcony of their mother's apartment. It was this senseless suicide that pushed Cooper to become a reporter, first with the youth-oriented Channel One and then ABC, traveling with his own video camera to dangerous regions of the world like Myanmar, Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. These passages are filled with vivid impressions of poverty, starvation and the personal impact of war. It becomes clear through Cooper's writing that he was seeking an escape from the personal pain he felt from his brother's premature death.

Ironically, the least interesting parts of the book have to do with his move to CNN. In spite of his sharp accounts about the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, especially expressive in his frustration with the minimal government support for the victims, he comes across a bit too pat and expeditious in his coverage of these events and the impact on him personally. Perhaps because so much has been covered by CNN, we take for granted that Cooper will provide more than a general hope for humanity. Regardless, the book provides a glimpse into a television personality who has used his own experiences with tragedy as a supremely empathetic means toward addressing the broader-based tragedies he covers. I look forward to his next set of memoirs.