Powerful, riveting, beautiful, passionate. It made me cry. Highly reccomended and a new favourite of mine.

Emotional first hand accounts of his reporting from Sarajevo, Bosnia, Somalia, and hurricane Katrina, interwoven with comparisons to the loss of his brother.
Wonderfully written.
Disastrous but beautiful.
We don't agree on our politics, but you'd never know.
He's truly a reporter.

Cooper is a soulful writer, weaving intimate details from his inner life with his travels around the world. It's official; he's perfect.

I really enjoyed this book. I started it a while back (I can get distracted by other books...), but I am glad I picked it up again. Anderson Cooper could be written off as the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, and a rich kid seeking adventure, but you would be wrong to do that. He initially propelled himself into countries in turmoil on his own dime, hoping to become as foreign correspondent. He did garner attention by a low budget cable network, Channel One, and sought out locals and people whose stories needed to be told. As a correspondent for CNN, he has brought his thoughtful human reporting from Sri Lanka in the wake of a tsunami, from Iraq being in-bedded with troops, to Niger covering starvation and human tragedy, and to New Orleans following the Katrina. His personal story, too, is one of despair after having lost his only brother to suicide, questioning, even today, if there had been anything he could have done to intervene. His memoir goes back and forth from his foreign stories, to his own life story and the life moments that colored his trajectory. I haven't much been a CNN watcher, but I may start to watch Anderson Cooper.

Dispatches from the edge was a very...not edgy book. Entertaining and enlightening perhaps, but but it is more likely to be that to someone who does not listen to NPR or BBC, or just does not know what is going on in the world. Cooper is a talented, ballsy reporter, no doubt, and his reports and blogs are great and informative, but this book, at least for me, was very much "nothing new under the moon." Entertaining, and a little sad, but not much else. Also, his narrative timeframe was a little disjointed; he bounced around a lot in time.

I finished this book and wanted more! This is the first time in my life I began a book in the middle of it and then read it through to where I started! I wanted to read about Anderson Cooper's Katrina experience so I began there!!! It was fine to do that ... really the book is made up of dispatches and he goes back and forth in the book ...

I really hope he writes another more in-depth autobiography. He is a fascinating person and watching him on TV all these years only makes you wonder more about what makes him who is is today.

I recommend this book ... an easy 48 hour one ... but captivating ... and well written! The only reason it didn't get 5 stars is because I wanted more of his inner self ... he revealed enough to make you want more!

A journalist's duty is to tell someone else's story. Personal opinion is to be put to the wayside as the journalist steps back and allows others to be heard when they normally don't have a voice on their own. So when a book from a respected journalist is released, I'm always curious to see how much of their personality shines through. Now we finally are able to get a glimpse inside their personal thoughts and experiences; unadulterated and ready for consumption.

Anderson Cooper's Dispatches From The Edge is a fascinating book from start to finish. As I devoured the pages in a single day, I felt as if I got to know Anderson personally. Much like a drama series on television, the book seamlessly jumps back and forth between Anderson situated in the middle of catastrophic events and flashbacks to his formative years. On one page we are with Anderson as he is witnessing carnage in Iraq, while on the next we are hearing about the death of his father and the suicide of his brother. We learn about the crucial points in his life that have built up Anderson's character, then seeing how they relate to his modern day experiences. This sort of back and forth is fluid and natural with each picture being painted so vividly that you feel you are right there alongside him.

Much like his journalism career, Anderson brings to our attention dire circumstances from around the world and tells the story for those who voices would remain silent. This speaks volume of his character as he could have took the easy way out by writing a book all about him. Instead, we receive insight into Anderson's life as well as education on horrific global events directly from the frontline.

Dispatches From The Edge is inspirational and begs to be read.

I was bored one day and this was lying around, so I read it. It was an easy read. In fact, it didn't really entertain me for long at all since it was over pretty quickly. While Anderson Cooper is a good writer, and he did have a story to tell, I just don't really care about him. Had I previously wondered what he was all about, this would have answered my questions, but I'm not really that familiar with him in the first place.

This deeply affecting memoir is so beautifully eloquent that I slowed down my reading to enjoy every word.
Interspersing memories both good and bad about his late father and brother with recollections of stories he covered in some very dangerous places, Cooper moves effortlessly from the past to the present without the sense of disjointedness that could have resulted. It all flows seamlessly.
While the stories from Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, Niger et al are interesting and intriguing, he really excels in his section on Hurricane Katrina. This part of the book is stunning for both its graphic descriptions of what it was really like down there and for Cooper's deep rage and pain at what he saw. His anger at the human tragedies burns off the pages. I couldn't put it down.

Fascinating but very depressing and scary because it's all true. A little hard to follow the timeline because it skips around, though it is clearly stated where and when the memory takes place. The whole thing is like one long panic attack. I wish I knew how I could help more, but I'm grateful for reporters like him that actually CARE.

It was very well-written. Anderson was very concise and clearly chose his words carefully--something I really appreciate after a succession of long-winded authors who seem to drone on endlessly about nothing. His intertwining of the extremely tragic scenes he has covered with his own personal tragedies was very powerful and moving. I only held off on a 5-star rating because there were parts where he jumped back and forth in time and places that made it hard to follow.

I recommend trying to read this in as few sittings as possible to keep all the characters straight.

Book on CD read by the author


This is Cooper’s memoir of how he came to be a senior anchor for CNN. The chapters are divided according to various memorable assignments covering war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, famine in Niger, a tsunami in Sri Lanka, and culminating with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina and that storm’s effects on New Orleans and the gulf coast area of Mississippi. Throughout he recalls his early childhood, as one tender or distressing scene brings back memories of his family.

He’s a talented journalist and one thing that makes him so is his ability to distance himself from what he is reporting. And yet, it’s clear that he is deeply affected by what he witnesses.

I think this may be especially evident when listening to his audio performance, and I think that added to the experience for me. Having Cooper read his own memoir really made it feel as if I were listening to him relate stories from his life while sitting in my own living room.

He’s a trained television journalist, so his delivery is clean and moves along at a good pace. However, I was struck by how frequently he swallows syllables at the end of a word. I expected a crisper diction, I guess.

The text includes photos from his childhood and the memorable assignments covered in this book.