Cooper, Anderson 1967- (Anderson Hays Cooper)

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Cooper, Anderson 1967- (Anderson Hays Cooper)

PERSONAL:

Born June 3, 1967, in New York, NY; son of Wyatt Cooper (an author) and Gloria Vanderbilt (a fashion designer). Education: Yale University, B.A., 1989; attended University of Hanoi.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Channel One, New York, NY, fact-checker c. 1989, freelance news correspondent, c. 1990-93, chief international correspondent, 1993-95; ABC News, New York, NY, correspondent and coanchor of World News Now, 1995-c. 2000, host of The Mole, 2000-01; Cable News Network (CNN), correspondent and substitute anchor, 2002; host of Anderson Cooper 360, CNN, 2003—. Also contributor to 60 Minutes, Columbia Broadcasting System, 2006—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

National Headliners Award, for tsunami coverage; Silver Plaque, Chicago International Film Festival, for reporting from Sarajevo on the Bosnian civil war; Bronze Telly, for coverage of famine in Somalia; Bronze Award, National Educational Film and Video Festival, for report on political Islam; GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding TV Journalism, for 20/20 Downtown report on high school athlete Corey Johnson; Emmy Awards, 2006, for live coverage of a breaking news event for Starving in Plain Sight and the feature-story award for Where Things Stand.

WRITINGS:

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

ADAPTATIONS:

Dispatches from the Edge has been adapted as an audiobook, Harper, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anderson Cooper is a television journalist who won a prime-time slot on the Cable News Network (CNN) with the show Anderson Cooper 360. Born into privilege—his mother is fashion mogul Gloria Vanderbilt—Cooper worked his way up in the television news world. He started by borrowing a video camera when he was twenty-three and going to Thailand to cover a coup, all the while armed with little more than a fake press identification. In the process of his fifteen-year-plus career, Cooper has gone around the world to report on wars, political upheavals, famines, and natural disasters. In his autobiography, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival, Cooper presents a mixture of personal memoir along with journalistic reporting. The author writes about his experiences as a reporter, including his coverage of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, the flooding of New Orleans, and his reporting from the Iraq War, all of which took place in 2005. He also discusses his time covering the famine in Niger and the civil war in Somalia. However, Cooper relates how reporting on these stories brought back old memories, such as the loss of his brother to suicide when he was a student in college and the death of his father when he was ten years old. Cooper also recounts his overall family history as he reveals to readers his own internal struggles.

In an article on the CBS News Web site, Cooper noted that that he has gone "places overseas where people are dealing with loss and dealing with tragedy and the emotions are much more palpable." The author added: "And you're able to discuss it and learn from it. So, part of writing the book was sort of showing and talking about what I've seen in all these places around the world and what I've learned about survival and what others can learn, as well." Cooper also commented on his motivation to write a memoir in an interview with Dave Karger in Entertainment Weekly, noting: "I tried to run from my past for many years. Finding myself in New Orleans and Mississippi in the wake of Katrina, in places I'd visited as a kid with my … dad, sort of brought the past into the present."

Referring to the memoir as "compelling," a Saturday Evening Post contributor wrote that the book "serves as a refreshing reminder of the power of the written word, especially words used sparingly and with deft precision to describe sights too graphic for network footage." Booklist critic Brad Hooper enjoyed the author's "straightforward yet passionate prose." Carla Luchetta commented in Biography that Dispatches from the Edge "is honest and full of relatable insights."