Great piece of writing which is more of a memoir than a journalist expose. I was inspired to read more of Anderson Cooper's works having just finished his work of nonfiction on the Vanderbilt family and I'm glad to have come across this, his first published work. Mostly about his early years of coverage of horrific scenes from Sri Lanka, Sarajevo, Rwanda, there are intermixed some memories of his early life and the tragedies which has befallen his family as the sorrows he encounters on the road bring these to the forefront of his consciousness. The book's final third concentrates on Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of that disaster and the shear devastation that occurred domestically haunts Cooper. What he bears witness to shares a starting resemblance to what he had seen around the world, in nations much more impoverished and without the resources one would have thought the US would have brought to bear to help the citizens of New Orleans. All in all a great memoir and I enjoyed listening to the audio version narrated by the author himself.

In this brave and thoughtful book, Anderson Cooper takes us behind the public face of a very private mad. He simply and poignantly talks about tragedies both global and personal. For a peek at how this book helped me understand my own escapist tendencies, read my full-length book review.

I’ve always wondered about Anderson Cooper’s story as he clearly didn’t need to be a war correspondent. After reading this memoir I feel like I understand him a bit better. The deaths of his father & brother understandably affected him quite a bit, which is what made him both restless and reckless. He grew up extremely privileged and yet has always seemed so down to earth. The first part of this book bounces around in time between countries and wars. It then switches to him being basically a storm chaser. Hurricane Katrina really upset him as he saw Americans being treated like third-world inhabitants. He wanted to find out the whys of how everything fell apart so that it wouldn’t happen again, and he couldn’t get answers. I understand his feelings pretty well and related to how jaded he is about politicians and the media.

And I have to say I’ve enjoyed watching his New Year’s specials with Kathy Griffin over the years! I now plan on reading all of his books.

Good book. Learned some things about Anderson I did not know. Well written for a easy read.

I read The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt a couple years ago and loved it, but didn't know Cooper had published anything else until I stumbled on Dispatches from the Edge. Dispatches is a memoir told in vignettes, tracing Cooper through a year in his journalistic life, whose events mirror those from his past. As Cooper grapples with the horrors he reports on from Baghdad to New Orleans, the line between personal and professional trauma becomes blurred. This one won't be for everyone - it is uncomfortably graphic - please see the list of TWs below and feel free to DM me for more info. Listening to the audio (narrated by the author) in my car meant I had built in breaks whenever things got too heavy, but I found myself taking the long route and not minding if there was traffic. Cooper knows how to tell a story, and this book is no exception. It is compellingly written and thought provoking, grappling with the idea that journalism is callous and exploitative as often as it is helpful. If you've ever wondered how international correspondents do what they do, how they "handle it," then this one is for you.⠀
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Trigger/content warnings: suicide, death of a child, death of a parent, violence toward animals, graphic images

I LOVED this memoir. The section about Katrina was absolutely heart-wrenching.

Don't waste your time.

while i think cooper's life is interesting, i thought his writing was frivolous and i didn't appreciate his style of jumping around chronologically. i understand what the point was--to show how everything connects, illustrate his fragmented emotional states, and the crazed lifestyle of a news correspondent, but it kind of made me feel motion sick. i thought the last few chapters on Katrina were the most insightful and well-written.

I always loved Anderson Cooper and his 360 on CNN. He seemed very gentle, empathetic human being. This memoir endorsed that opinion about him.

This book is a memoir of catastrophes, wars, famine and natural disasters Cooper had covered during his early years of journalism. He boldly admits that as a journalist he always looked for the best story, photo or video footage to show on the media, but those best were the nightmares for the subjects of the stories.

Cooper has interwoven his personal life tragedies and his own demons into the narration. It gives a glimpse of his own mindset, values, fears and aspirations.

Various literary devices make the narration fluid and capturing. He takes the reader to the beaches of Tsunami hit Shrilanka , war fronts in the Middle East and famine ridden Africa. I was in Thailand when the Tsunami devastated the South East Asia. Island of Phuket was washed clean by the waters of the ocean. I had a Burmese domestic help in the house. Some nights , I used to hear screams and sobs from her room. She had a picture of a young man in her wallet. It was her husband. He was in Phuket. She wanted few days off to visit him. One night she disappeared, and returned in the morning with her aunt. She had red spots all over her body as if somebody had assaulted her. The aunt had a story. The husband was washed away in the Tsunami in front of her eyes while she was clinging on to an electric pole. She refused to accept the death of her husband and was waiting for his return. Sometimes she would have nightmares, the ghosts would haunt her and during that time she would visit Burmese witch doctor to free her from the ghosts . The dark patches used to be the witchcraft- Her aunt explained. Cooper has so many such stories.

Finally, it is an intense book, takes the reader to the edge of the world.

I stumbled upon this book a few days ago and am very glad that I did. It's a quick, but significant read. I've never really paid that much attention to news anchors, but Anderson Cooper's life is worth a story. Born into the Vanderbilt lineage, Cooper lost his father and his brother at an early age. He has spent the rest of his life trying to cope with both of those losses and chose the medium of field reporting in order to do so. This particular book chronicles Cooper's 2005, a year fraught with the tsunami, the Iraq war, famine in Niger, and of course, Hurricane Katrina. Cooper shares his bird's eye view, having covered them all from the front lines.

This book is much more than an annual almanac, however. Cooper weaves his life story into the disasters of 2005, and in the process, connects his losses with those of the greater world. If I had criticisms of the book, it would be that the writing is sometimes choppy (very news headline-ish) and the tangential stories told in the midst of chapters can make the timeline a bit confusing. However, I see what Cooper is doing - this book is almost a stream of consciousness for him as he tries to come to terms with the losses in his life. Beyond that, Cooper offers a window into the dissension that goes on in the mind of a journalist, attempting to maintain journalistic objectivity while remaining a compassionate human. It's a timely topic as the issue has arisen several times in Haiti.

In any case, I highly recommend this book. To be sure, it is less than uplifting and offers a window into some of the more tortured parts of the human experience, but it's brutally honest about it. In addition, for anyone who's ever lost someone in their life, I found this book as a bit of a salve and I definitely recommend it. Finally, the book only added to the respect I've been building for Anderson Cooper in watching him cover the Haiti earthquake. He seems to be the model of what journalism should be.

I have always thought of Anderson Cooper as a thoughtful-looking self-contained news guy, and expected this book to be a fair amount of self-promotional blather interspersed with a few biographical details. Instead, I found that Anderson Cooper, in addition to being a t-l s-c news guy, writes like one. This memoir is thoughtful, self-contained, filled with news-that-was, and surprisingly well written. (My expectations are seldom high.)

The wars are comprehensive--Bosnia, Somalia, Niger, Iraq. The disasters are earth-shattering news--Sri Lanka after the tsunami, Rwanda at the beginning of the starvation, Hurricane Katrina--and life-shattering personal tragedies--the death of his father when he was ten, and the harrowing suicide of his only brother while he was at college. The survival is his own, both personally and professionally.

Stories of his childhood and personal life are interspersed with behind-the-scenes reviews of the headline news he covered, from his first post-college foray into Thailand as a freelancer to his four-week CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina damage from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Cooper's knack of stringing these seemingly-disparate stories into a cohesive whole is a testament to his intelligence and skill. Add to that his ability to completely sidestep any personal life he might have had since 1991, and his skills ratchet up even higher. (You think I exaggerate? Careful reading reveals the existence of a dog, friends, and a phone call to his mother.)

So, if you think you could like this, read it. You will.

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival is an autobiographical memoir written by Anderson Cooper. It is an autobiographical memoir of a television journalist who shares his personal life among the devastation he has the privilege of reporting on.

Anderson Hays Cooper is an American television journalist and political commentator. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is usually broadcast live from a New York City studio. However, Cooper often broadcasts live from CNN's studios in Washington, D.C., or on location for breaking news stories.

Cooper is an intrepid reporter: he's traveled to tsunami-ravaged Asia, famine-plagued Niger, war-torn Somalia and Iraq, and New Orleans post-Katrina. However, the plights of the people and places he visits take a backseat to the fact that Cooper was there as he shares his feelings of his personal life while he was reporting on these tragedies.

Cooper, a Yale-educated son of heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt weaves personal tragedies and awkwardly parallels them into far graver stories of suffering he's observing. Even when he plies the reader with his own unease and obliquely decries television news's demand for images of extreme misery, he seems to place himself in front of his subjects in a defiance of sorts.

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival is written rather well. Cooper is an intelligent, passionate man and a wonderful journalist. However, the book wasn't what I expected. Instead of a memoir of the places he visited and the tragedies he’s investigated. It was more of an autobiography of his past experiences, which Cooper clumsily tries to parallel with the tragedies he's reporting on.

All in all, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival is a wonderfully written memoir of an amazing investigational journalist who has seen humanity at their lowest points – just not the one I was expecting.