I was pretty pleased with this novel, until Coop became political around the Katrina stories. He's entitled, and how dare he write that the US wasn't acting fast enough! In something as unprecedented as Hurricane Katrina, the US did all they could. I was one of those troops. The city of New Prleans is more to blame. They weren't prepared. That's like the teacher reading the book and her students reading a chapter, failing a test, then the teacher is blamed. Cooper is merely a puppet. Cooper loved taking time to write about the military and conservative leadership that responded to this crisis. Cooper doesn't know the first thing about any story except to exploit people for his career gains. That is what this novel became.

It's unbelievable that many reviews for this book tend to focus on the completely irrelevant fact that Anderson Cooper is gay. It proves his point about how many simply forget about disasters. Here the book outlines disasters all over the world and goes into extreme detail about Hurricane Katrina and yet "Is he really gay" are the words in the first reviews that pop up. Some of you folks make me sick.

This book is intense. The Hurricane Katrina piece is especially jarring. I highly recommend this easy to read, not so easy to digest account of what it was like behind the cameras. Behind the things a puritanical society won't allow to be shown, or spoken of, on television. This is a shockingly heartfelt memoir, far away from such immature questions about the authors sexuality.

I wish everyone could be as caring and informative as Anderson cooper

This is a book everyone should read. Mr coopers stories of real people are both heart rending and heart lifting. He makes you feel as tho you are in the places from which he reports. I’ll always remember watching him with tears on his cheeks in a boat in flooded New Orleans.

Very sad book! Holy smokes, his assessment of the disaster after Hurricane Katrina and the bedlam that was New Orleans is a real eye opener. His family history is haunting. His honesty is actually unnerving. I thoroughly enjoyed the book although the truth is, I would rather it never had had to be written.

This is one of the best books I've ever enjoyed. Cooper digs deeply into himself and his past while giving candid and articulate information about the places he has visited and the stories he's covered. He articulates the character of disaster victims that he met around the planet and made me feel like I could really see what he was seeing, how he was seeing it. A great quality book that I very highly recommend.

This was a big no for me. The book was not at all what I expected from someone like Anderson Cooper. It was choppy and phrases were repeated enough to be noticeable. I would have DNF'd it but I kept going because the book was so short.

God this was magnificent. Anderson Cooper weaves his own personal history with death and loss into his work covering tragedy across the globe in a way that's so profound...I picked this up thinking it'd just be stories and anecdotes from his assignments covering wars and disasters but it's so much more than that, and I love the epilogue and final words he leaves us with. It's from 2006, so it's pretty 'dated' in terms of his career and who he was/what he was doing at the time it was published, but I like having that remove and reading something that was published before he was truly FAMOUS-famous.

I wanted to like this book. I read the entire thing in one sitting. It was gripping and interesting. Then I got to the part that lost me--the American Exceptionalism Anderson Cooper displays in talking about Katrina. I understand his feeling that something like that couldn't happen in the United States, blah, blah, blah, but I wish it was presented critically, and that he showed himself as wrong for thinking like that, but nope. We're left with the idea that Hurricane Katrina is so much worse than all of the stuff he saw in Africa and Southeast Asia band Eastern Europe because it happened in the United States, where stuff like that isn't supposed to happen. As if. Sorely disappointed.

This biographical book runs back and forth between the author's childhood and various disasters he covered as a reporter. I appreciate his direct style, and the way that he says things that do not always present him in a good light.

Appreciated also were the insights he gained from his front row seat in Katrina's aftermath, a tsunami, a war or two, and a famine. Anderson does a good job illustrating how the journalistic approach to life distorts and is at times inhumane as it seeks to do a good thing; namely, to let others who are not present realize the magnitude of such horrors and perhaps do something to alleviate it.

If you are interested in this topic, then you will also appreciate an excellent book that is similar, but with a catchier title: Emergency Sex.

I have seen Anderson Cooper reporting segments from various locations around the world, typically wherever some disaster were happening. I picked this book to read expecting some greater detail and what the life of an international reporter is like. I guess I did get some of that interspersed with tradgedies from his personal life. I guess it didn't grip and hold my attention like I expected based on watching his on-the-scene TV reports. I still found it interesting and it is worth reading. I'm not a regular for watching his broadcasts but usually like what I see when I do happen to catch him. I guess what it is for me is I think he is better on TV than in a book; in other words, the delivery is the difference.

bought it secondhand for like a dollar. good read and tbh LOVE HIM

Very in the moment of Hurricane Katrina and that episode takes up too much of the small book but Cooper writes well and is aware of the contradictions that being In The Media demands.

More affecting are stories of African famine, Bosnia, and Mogadishu.