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Biography & Autobiography. Sociology. Nonfiction. HTML: From one of America's leading reporters comes a deeply personal, extraordinarily powerful look at the most volatile crises he has witnessed around the world, from New Orleans to Baghdad and beyond. Dispatches from the Edge of the World is a book that gives us a rare up-close glimpse of what happens when the normal order of things is suddenly turned upside down, whether it's a natural disaster, a civil war, or a heated political battle. Over the last year, few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has become the touchstone of twenty-first century journalism. This book explores in a very personal way the most important - and most dangerous - crises of our time, and the surprising impact they have had on his life. From the devastating tsunami in South Asia to the suffering Niger, and ultimately Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Cooper shares his own experiences of traversing the globe, covering the world's most astonishing stories. As a television journalist, he has the gift of speaking with an emotional directness that cuts through the barriers of the medium. In his first book, that passion communicates itself through a rich fabric of memoir and reportage, reflection and first-person narrative. Unflinching and utterly engrossing, this is the story of an extraordinary year in a reporter's life..… (more)
User reviews
Anderson Cooper provided an interesting and honest story that showed the positive and negative aspects of his life. Flashbacks were used to tie his childhood to his adult problems and achievements. Teenage readers can relate to losing family members as well as the effects of hurricanes and war on their lives. The story is told in a way that allows the reader into his life. As he comes to terms with his life, the reader can reflect on their own family and circumstances. Anderson Cooper did a great job of describing the pain and suffering of the people affected by war, starvation, and natural disaster. The reader could imagine being places he covered with his news stories. Young adults could certainly relate to the Hurricane Katrina coverage that was described in the book. It was a story of Anderson Cooper understanding himself and sharing his personal feelings with the world. This memoir was not sugar-coated or written in a way that drew attention or fame to the author.
It's been awhile since I've read it and my mom has my copy of the book, so I can't give you a more detailed description. I can tell you that this is a worthwhile read. He really opened my eyes to the atrocities that take place in the
Dispatches from the Edge didn't leave me feeling dismal, but it did have me really wrestle with the bad things in the world and praise God that I have hope in Christ. This also inspired me to keep up-to-date with what is going on in the world. I want a globe. I've reasearched and kept up with what is happening in Darfur. I also know that I want to raise my children to know where places in the world are located.
Do you know where Kashmir is located?
It may be worth taking a look and you won't be wasting your time if you pick up this book.
The cover of his book states that it is a memoir of war, disaster and survival and I was under the
While I am sorry that he had to deal with the tragedies in his life, so does every other person. He just gets paid for it is all.
I was not impressed. It would have been much better if he had given maybe a chapter in the beginning on his personal life and the rest to the wars he covered.
I picked it up, having no intention to start reading it then but just to see what it was like.
The next thing I knew, I was on page sixty, having gotten completely hooked on the book.
The book is a weird experience in the sense that you learn so much about Anderson and at the same time he eludes you completely. He's honest and candid, and it seems like he doesn't try to make himself seem any better a person than he is. Through all the wars and disasters he's seen he seems connected to the world in a way that I could never be without probably going insane, but at the same time disconnected from everything as well, because of his loss in both his father and brother. He likens himself to a shark in that he needs to stay moving in order to stay alive.
At times it was even painful to read, because there was a feeling to me like he doesn't really have anything to lose. Towards the end the feeling eases, like there's hope and healing.
I'm not sure if any of this made any sense, because what this book did to me is it left my head and heart full of thoughts and feelings that are just completely mixed up in each other. The book will definitely stay with me for a long long time, and it'll be the book I'll recommend to everyone.
On the other hand, however, it does have pictures of Cooper's beautiful self.
I think this is a book for everybody. To see how someone will risk their life for other people but also so we do not forget the tragedies here in the USA and around the world.
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
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.
Cooper comes across very much as he does on TV, earnest, honest and quite guarded. His writing seemed to be careful not to reveal too much about himself which I suspect is something he has adhered to his whole life. Both growing up as the son of a very famous woman, and in the career that he has chosen, he seems more comfortable talking about events rather than himself. And while the book was interesting, I don’t feel as if he revealed much about the man behind the image. Two tragedies in particular, the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina helped to catapult Cooper’s career and eventually led to his becoming the anchor on his own CNN show.
I found Dispatches From the Edge to be an informative and intelligent book written by an empathetic complicated person who was able to build upon his ground-breaking coverage of world events to become the media star that he is today.
Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disaster, and Survival is a touching remembrance from CNN superstar Anderson Cooper. Covering portions of his childhood and the darker moments of his youth, it also details heart-wrenching details of his reporting on Hurricane Katrina and the wars in the Middle East. Filled with honest and frank recollections from not only the front lines of some of our most recent calamities, Cooper also pushes his investigations internally to find out what drives him to consistently drop himself into some of the worst places on Earth.
The first thing that grabbed me about this book was the random similarities I didn’t expect to share with Anderson Cooper. His father passed away when he was ten years old, mine when I was five. It had a dramatic effect on each of our lives. He mentions his inability to fully process the emotional impact of that event, and the later suicide of his older brother, as key reasons for his apparent addiction to placing himself in the literal and psychological cross-hairs of the worst spots in the world.
Some of the most interesting parts, including those about his personal life, are when Cooper reveals many of the things he saw that never made the news, things deemed unworthy of CNN coverage. One scene talks about when he was in the Middle East passing out over 200 gallons of water to locals with the help of our armed forces. No one died that day, no IEDs went off, so no one ever heard about it. Cooper sadly admits the old adage that still holds sway over all news coverage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Another story mentions gruesome and horrific details about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The utter lawlessness committed not only by the locals taking advantage of the chaos, but law enforcement personnel who devolved just as much into primitive gangs of roving warlords. Some of those stories were snuffed out early on because it was deemed too dangerous in risking a possible backlash against all authority, which very well could have happened, but it doesn’t make the reality of it any easier to swallow.
Cooper also eloquently covers his tenuous balancing act between being an unbiased reporter and an opinionated celebrity. Once he made it out the other end of some incredibly dangerous job hunting tactics, landing in the spotlight of CNN forever altered his ability to reach millions of people and also his struggle to keep his sanity. He now was given access to people and events ranging from awe-inspiring to nightmare-inducing. With great skill and strain he has always come from those places knowing he had to wrap those images into a coherent story meant to inform, educate and enhance the world discussion. The Achilles heel for any reporter is to somehow deliver that information without bias and political overtones, which Cooper has managed to do time and time again, making him one of the most respected in the business.
In the last couple of years, Cooper has begun to step out of the middle ground and reposition himself as a true fact finder in a much more aggressive sense. Under the moniker, “Keeping Them Honest”, Cooper began bringing on politicians and other notable news makers when he felt something they were preaching about was demonstrably false. No longer fulfilled by calmly reporting the facts to his audience, Cooper decided to drive the falsehoods out into the light during live interviews. The only down side is if he brings on someone from the right side of the political spectrum and corrects them, Cooper becomes labeled a liberal activist, and if the guest is more left leaning, Cooper becomes labeled a political tool for the right. It seems like a no-win situation for him, but he is taking it in stride, sticking to what he believes is meaningful for people to know and that is what keeps him cemented as one of the best in the industry. Dispatches tries to ride that thin line as well, pointing out the inequities in the reporting that most of the country saw, while not coming down as an outright attack on the media as a whole.