OMFG(otta Read) - Anderson Cooper's Book: Dispatches From The Edge

Dispatches From the Edge: 

A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival

by Anderson Cooper  

(HarperCollins, 2006)

USA Today said it was "Powerful....Cooper opens a tantalizing window into his soul."

In Anderson Cooper's book, 'Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, & Survival', he writes about his amazing journalistic experiences; focusing mostly on the year 2005.  He enlightens readers on what it was like to cover new stories in Iraq, during the aftermath of the Tsunami, & during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans & Mississippi.  He gives us a look into this personal life by writing about his upper class family (his mother is Gloria Vanderbilt) and his brother (who committed suicide). Anderson also writes about the start of his career. Did you know he started out covering stories overseas with a fake press pass?!  I highly recommend this book to our OMFG readers.  Some of the stories he tells are disturbing, but it's a real eye-opener to what these events and places were like during these disasters.  The book is an easy read and is definitely a page turner; I couldn't put it down! Here are some excerpts from the book to give you a feel for it.  Let me know what you think if you decide to read it OR if you have already read it.

~S

Tsunami:
"It took centuries for the pressure to build. Subtle shifts, grinding force. Long ago, a thousand miles east of Sri Lanka, more than fifteen miles below the surface of the Indian Ocean, two gigantic shelves of rock, tectonic plates, pressed against each other -- the rim of what scientists call the India Plate began to push underneath the Burma Plate. Something had to give. At nearly one minute before 8:00 a.m., the morning after Christmas, 2004, the force of the compression explodes along a section of rock some one hundred miles off the west coast of Sumatra. A fault line more than seven hundred miles long violently rips open and a shelf of rock and sediment thrusts upward fifty feet, unleashing an explosion of energy so powerful it alters the rotation of the earth. It is one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history".................."It takes eight minutes after the earthquake begins for the sonic signals to reach the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, in Hawaii. The thin needle of a seismograph suddenly springs to life, rapidly scribbling side to side, signaling an alarm. It's already too late. Eight minutes later, at approximately 8:15 a.m., in Banda Aceh, Sumatra, the first of several massive walls of water explodes onto shore. In the next two hours, tsunami waves strike ten other countries. More than two hundred thousand people will die."

Hurricane Katrina: 
"In Sri Lanka, in Niger, you never assume anyone will help. You take it for granted that governments don't work, that people are on thier own. There's a different level of expectation. Here, you grow up believing theres a safety net, that things can never completely fall apart. Katrina showed us all that's not true. For all the money spent on homeland security, all the preparations that have allegedly been made, we are not ready, not even for a disaster we know is coming. We can't take care of our own. The world can break apart in our own backyard, and when it does many of us will simply fall off."

"I'm not shocked anymore by the bodies, the blunders"......"You can't stay stunned forever. The anger doesn't go away, but it settles somewhere behind your heart; it deepens into resolve. … Here in New Orleans, the compartmentalization I've always maintained has fallen apart, been worn down by the weight of emotion, the power of memory. For so long I tried to separate myself from my past. I tried to move on, forget what I'd lost, but the truth is, none of it's ever gone away. The past is all around, and in New Orleans I can't pretend it's not."

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