Dispatches from the Edge (Anderson Cooper)

Anderson Cooper has been a reporter and anchor for CNN for years, bringing back stories from some of the worst places in the world: Sarajevo, Somalia, Beirut, Iraq, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, In this memoir he tells what some of those stories were like. He talks about the driving need to tell the truth about what people were experiencing, and about the need to get out there where lives were in danger because of his own addiction to the adrenaline rush. It is an honest and open look at what this life was like for him. He also talked about his own childhood, growing up as the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, losing his father to a heart attack at age 10 and his brother to suicide four years later. These stories helped illuminate the person he became, but I have to admit the juxtaposition was often annoying, as when the tears of a grandmother in Sarajevo, whose family was torn apart and dying, reminded him of the tears of his nanny when she had to leave as he entered high school. Though I'm sure the psychological resonance was real, he seemed to be equating his loss to hers. When he talked about the lives of those around him, though, his voice spoke true.