Book Review: Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper is worried he's a shark. The issue comes up again and again in Dispatches from the Edge, the million-dollar memoir he wrote as his popularity soared in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Cooper, reporting for CNN, achieved a kind of heroism when, in the midst of the glacially paced aid efforts, he called bullshit on Senator Mary Landrieu's name-dropping non-answer to questions about who was responsible for the dismal state of rescue and relief operations. A collective cheer went out; Cooper was doing what makes Jon Stewart influential, cutting through the obfuscatory dialects of journalists and politicians, and he was doing it with utter sincerity, as a journalist — and human being — who was tired of the party line being tossed out instead of life-lines. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Anderson Cooper.

It was not the first time Cooper's status rose thanks to disaster. "The irony was, the more sadness I saw, the more success I had," he notes. As a journalist, he made his name in Somalia, in Yugoslavia; he covered Haiti, Russia, Rwanda, Niger and visited Indonesia in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. Starting out as a freelancer, then on staff, for in-school network Channel One before moving on to ABC and CNN, Cooper found himself compelled to run towards disaster. In this way, Cooper again and again seems to be filling the idealized role of a foreign correspondent, idealistic and egoistic and running away from himself. Like a shark, Cooper notes, not only was he drawn to the scent of blood, but he was always on the move.

I sometimes believe it's motion that keeps me alive as well. I hit the ground running: truck gassed up, camera rolling - "locked and loaded, ready to rock," as a soldier in Iraq once said to me. There's nothing like that feeling. Your truck screeches to a halt, you leap out, the camera resting on the space between your shoulder and neck. You run toward what everyone else is running from, believing your camera will somehow protect you, not really caring if it doesn't. All you want to do is get, feel it, be in it.

This is the romantic side of journalism, the part I sometimes fantasize about for myself. There is a martyrdom to it; you sacrifice your own life in pursuit of the story. This is the cost that journalists often have to pay. For Cooper, who wanted to outrun his father's early death, his brother's suicide, the thrill of the chase was a drug that heightened feeling. He describes being under fire in Yugoslavia:

I'd just set up my tripod when I heard a loud crack. I turned and saw a tile fall off a nearby column. By the time it hit the ground, I realized that it had been struck by a bullet. Someone had taken a shot. I didn't know if they were shooting at me or someone else, but it didn't matter. I ran behind a nearby building, and the sniper peppered the area with automatic fire. I captured some of it on camera, and narrated what I was seeing. I was white as a corpse. When I looked at the tape recently, though, I saw something I hadn't remembered. I noticed the faint hint of a smile on my face.

With death everywhere, it is hard not to feel alive.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

Visit Bonnie's author page — Bonnie's Blog