- Hardcover: 212 pages
- Publisher: Harper Collins Canada; 1 edition (May 23 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0061132381
- ISBN-13: 978-0061132384
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#8,982 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Books > Reference > Writing > Journalism
- #3 in Books > Nonfiction > Current Events > Disaster Relief
- #12 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Journalists
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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
From Publishers Weekly
HarperCollins touts the handsome, prematurely gray host of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360°as the "prototype for a twenty-first century newsman." Sadly, that statement is all too true. This brief, self-involved narrative reaffirms a troubling cultural shift in news coverage: journalists used to cover the story; now, more than ever, they are the story. 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. Here, however, the plights of the people and places he visits take a backseat to the fact that Cooper is, well, there. The Yale-educated son of heiress and designer Gloria Vanderbilt weaves personal tragedies (at 10, he lost his father to heart disease and later his older brother to suicide) awkwardly into far graver stories of suffering he's observing. Even when he plies the reader with his own unease ("the more sadness I saw, the more success I had") and obliquely decries TV news's demand for images of extreme misery ("merely sick won't warrant more than a cut-away shot"), he seems to place himself in front of his subjects. Cooper is an intelligent, passionate man and he may be a terrific journalist. But this book leaves one feeling he's little more than a television personality. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth reading for the writing alone,
By Mr Rabbit (BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
Ce commentaire est de: Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Hardcover)
I came across this book because I have been watching AC 360 since its inception and was always interested to know more about this rather strange man who looks young, yet all grey haired. Not that there is anything "wrong" with being prematurely grey, but there was something about him that was unique and different from anyone else on television.Although this book is a memoir, I walked away not really knowing what he really thinks about all that he has witnessed and experienced. There are times he mentions here and there about how he is feeling, but I just can't get a sense of what he is really feeling. He describes what he sees in a rather graphic yet very simple detail. The feelings that are generated from reading this book comes from the reader, not from Anderson. At the end of the book he says that all of the painful memories of his past have now come to some form of rest. But you don't see him talking about how he has resolved all of the pain and what he thinks about all that has happened to him. You just find yourself in the last chapter, and he simply mentions how everything is somehow OK now. So you really don't get to know what's really going on inside him, and I wished he talked about his feelings and his thinking. After all, it is a memoir, but it somehow feels like it isn't. The writing is superb though. I've read his articles in Details magazine, and he writes as though he is talking. There is no waste, no big words that takes up space. It's always to the point, and very easy to read. He describes so much in very short sentences. It's as though each word is jam packed with so many meaning behind it. Each chapter starts off with an incident or a story, but then you quickly find yourself in a totally different story, as he begins talking about another incident that has no bearing with the one before. For example, a chapter may say: "The Tsunami." But within this one chapter, you read about his childhood, then about how he volunteers for CNN during the new year to avoid socializing, then off to another completly different story. Thus, each chapter has several different stories in it. Some may find such a layout rather disorienting. But I think it's deliberate, to show how memories are not coherent, that it remains in the mind as jumbled thoughts, all floating around in one big soup. Also, it enalbes the reader to expereince what it must be like to all of a sudden be in one country, then within the next 24 hours find oneself in the middle of a bloody genocide in Rwanda, for example. It seems that's how Anderson lives his life--disorienting, but full of life's adventure.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
like AC360 in book form,
By
Ce commentaire est de: Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Paperback)
The book hops around within chapters from Anderson Cooper's boyhood/young adulthood to his initial forays as a foreign correspondent for Channel One to his current work with CNN. It is a fascinating way to write a book and his breezy, easygoing yet powerful way of speaking comes through as it does weeknights on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360.I won't give too much away but you will better understand where Cooper is coming from after reading his tragic family history (losing both his father and his brother far too soon). In fact this book is better than what we see on TV from him as we get to learn his real emotions and his inner conflicts without it evolving into an "oh woe is me" tale. Plus there is loads of gallows humor sprinkled throughout. A quick read but a thoroughly enjoyable one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Uneasy Life,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
Ce commentaire est de: Dispatches From The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (Paperback)
Anderson Cooper's recent memoir is more a testimony to how he sees himself functioning in the larger world than a critical judgment of its values. As I read through Cooper's review of his rather adventurous but tragic life, I couldn't help but think that here is a very intelligent man searching for a means by which to make sense of his sheltered and privileged existence. To that end, the book is full of dashes here and there in search of opportunities to connect with the outside world. As someone who has grown up in luxury - his mother was the famous Gloria Vanderbilt - Cooper, as one of society's golden boy, shuns all those connections in pursuit of making a worthy contribution to humanity. The reader should have no problem in recognizing this need. Cooper, as an investigative journalist, with a nose for the unusual and a deep compassion for those who suffer, dares to go where no man has gone before. There are no safe places, including his own haunted past, that Cooper does not venture into with a desire to make his audience more fully aware that news emanates from a desire to want to truly connect with those in need. War, famine, and natural disaster are Cooper's balliwacks as he tries to capture the stories of those who have no voice in the midst of their respective calamities. The horrors of the Balkan civil wars, Sri Lankan tsunamis, Rwandan holocausts, Iraqi invasions, Somalian famines and New Orleans hurricanes serve as effective backdrop for Cooper's global forays and reportings. While some of us might find his manner of speech subdued and unengaging, what he has to say is insightful and enlightening. He is someone who really notices things and incorporates them personally before sharing them with the larger world around him. As a reporter, his goal appears one of heightening our awareness of the world through a greater appreciation of in-depth analysis of the news. The ideal outcome of any news story is that we should continue to investigate and, above all else, remember what it has to say about those less fortunate than ourselves. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants the story that goes with the thirty-second sound bites of television most of us are accustomed to getting from the news every night.
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