Famous journalist Anderson Cooper gives his readers an inside view on his personal life while reporting on global natural disasters and other world events for CNN. Cooper shares the death of his brother while he was still young and how it caused him to go into journalism. He depicts situations of frightening civil unrest while serving as a war correspondent in Iraq and during famine in Niger. He describes in detail the events leading from the tsunami of Sri Lanka in 2004, as well as the horrors of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. His tale is one of human pain and survival.
As a child, Cooper lived with his older brother and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. His father died when he was the age of ten, and as the years passed, he began to remember less and less of him. When Cooper was older, he and his brother, Carter, were not as close as they used to be. They had grown so far apart that when Carter Cooper committed suicide off the balcony of their fourteenth floor apartment in New York, he could not understand why. Therefore, with himself and his mother racked with the numbness from pain, Cooper turned to journalism in order to feel something again.
In Sri Lanka, a terrible tsunami had struck. Cooper, with his news crew, had gone to make a report. This was not his first report, however the carnage still stunned him. Many people in temples had been swept away, and children had been declared dead or gone missing. This was the first Cooper revealed to his readers of the pain that is more often considered real abroad than in the United States.
In Iraq, Cooper was a war correspondent. He began his trip cautiously wearing heavy body armor, but even after watching some around him being killed, he realized the futility and removed it for good, earning the respect and trust from locals.
In Niger, Cooper followed the stories of some nutrient-deprived children during a time of famine. He did his best to hope, but many of these children soon perished.
In Mississippi and Louisiana, Cooper describes his time reporting on the terrible occurrences after Hurricane Katrina. With low provisions, shelter, healthcare, the dead in the streets, more police forces than citizens, it was eerily similar to the war torn countries Cooper had visited before. Calamities continued to occur, and the United States was not prepared. Anderson Cooper writes this as a warning to not become too comfortable with the tranquility of a rich country. Disaster can strike at any moment, and as shown in the aftermath of Katrina, we are not as prepared nor protected as we believe.