ABAW: Anderson Cooper's Dispatches From the Edge

Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

Harper Audio, 2006 by Anderson Cooper (library copy)

Journalist Anderson Cooper’s memoir is an engaging story of a driven professional haunted by personal loss. Cooper does not flinch from discussion of his famous family (the Vanderbilts), the death of his father when Cooper was ten, or the suicide of his older brother when Cooper was in college. Cooper recounts his early career in journalism, fact-checking for Channel One, and his first self-assignment, with a fake press pass in Somalia in the early nineties. Cooper weaves together these personal and professional memories with notable places and stories from his career. He relies throughout the story on the metaphor of a shark that must keep moving in order to breathe. He and other journalists are sharks circling the water when they sense blood or disaster, but in a very personal, psychological sense, Cooper doesn’t feel like he can stop moving.

I get the sense that Cooper feels apologetic for a great many things — his privileged background, his personal loss, the darker side of humanity — but his drive to be on the ground where big news is happening, and his desire to make the world a better place (even when he doubts his ability to do anything real) create an appealing image of the increasingly iconic journalist. The chapters discussing Hurricane Katrina are harrowing, all the more for the way Cooper juxtaposes them to events in bloody war zones around the world. You’ll never use the word ‘looting’ in the same way after you hear Cooper’s description of the doctor taking much-needed drugs from a CVS while police hold people back at gun point. Cooper is unable to sit still for very long, driven forward but seeking out the good in the world, thriving on field reporting even as his success has made him an anchor. His sense of responsibility to people keeps him human and humane. 

My favorite bits:

• “Desperate people sometimes do terrible things.”
• As a child, “[Andy Warhol’s] white hair scared me.”
• Also as a small child, seeing the statue of his forbear, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Cooper thought everyone’s relatives died and turned into statues.
• The frightening shock and teetering lawlessness of police and rescue workers in New Orleans in the Katrina aftermath is given some relief with the prank between the police precincts over the Fort Apache sign.