This article is from the WebMD the Magazine -- Feature Archive

While in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, in which 35,000 of that country's people perished, CNN reporter Anderson Cooper met a small group of women, each of whom had lost a loved one to the sea. Cooper envied their ability to talk through their pain. "I still find myself unable to do it," he writes in his new memoir, Dispatches From the Edge. "Walking in this village, listening to these people, is as close as I can come."

From the outside looking in, it would seem that Cooper has led a life of privilege, not of pain: a child of wealth who grew up in Manhattan's toniest neighborhoods, the son of successful fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, and a rising star in the dog-eat-dog world of television journalism. Even so, Cooper seems to identify most with the grieving, the shell-shocked, and the abandoned, whether he finds these citizens of loss in Southeast Asia or in his late father's former stomping grounds, New Orleans.

In fact, Cooper has made a career out of pain: The newsman has reported from many of the world's most dangerous places. In addition to his tour of Sri Lanka, he has witnessed the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda, and has filed countless stories on human suffering and against-the-odds tales of survival. But it was only in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina -- an American tragedy that saw the anchor, live on CNN, interrupting authorities, demanding answers, pummeling bureaucrats with unflinching questions, and fighting tears of enraged frustration -- that he started to come to terms with his own family's tragedies and how they have influenced him, on and off camera.

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