Legends Book Club: February’s Book Selection

Last month I introduced the Legends Book Club, a virtual book club designed to explore the lives of “legends” (from athletes and artists, to businesspeople, politicians, scientists and more). Our goal is to understand how these extraordinary people reached their dreams (and all of the challenges, fears and roadblocks they faced along the way) so we can learn from their experiences as we follow our own dreams.

In January, we read Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi. Today I am excited to announce February’s book:

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper

Target reading pace: 8-10 pages per day

Synopsis

Few people have witnessed more scenes of chaos and conflict around the world than Anderson Cooper, whose groundbreaking coverage on CNN has changed the way we watch the news. In this gripping, candid, and remarkably powerful memoir, he offers an unstinting, up-close view of the most harrowing crises of our time, and the profound impact they have had on his life.

After growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Cooper felt a magnetic pull toward the unknown, an attraction to the far corners of the earth. If he could keep moving, and keep exploring, he felt he could stay one step ahead of his past, including the fame surrounding his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the tragic early deaths of his father and older brother. As a reporter, the frenetic pace of filing dispatches from war-torn countries, and the danger that came with it, helped him avoid having to look too closely at the pain and loss that was right in front of him.

But recently, during the course of one extraordinary, tumultuous year, it became impossible for him to continue to separate his work from his life, his family’s troubled history from the suffering people he met all over the world. From the tsunami in Sri Lanka to the war in Iraq to the starvation in Niger and ultimately to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Mississippi, Cooper gives us a firsthand glimpse of the devastation that takes place, both physically and emotionally, when the normal order of things is violently ruptured on such a massive scale. Cooper had been in his share of life-threatening situations before — ducking fire on the streets of war-torn Sarejevo, traveling on his own to famine-stricken Somalia, witnessing firsthand the genocide in Rwanda — but he had never seen human misery quite like this. Writing with vivid memories of his childhood and early career as a roving correspondent, Cooper reveals for the first time how deeply affected he has been by the wars, disasters, and tragedies he has witnessed, and why he continues to be drawn to some of the most perilous places on earth.

Striking, heartfelt, and utterly engrossing, Dispatches from the Edge is an unforgettable memoir that takes us behind the scenes of the cataclysmic events of our age and allows us to see them through the eyes of one of America’s most trusted, fearless, and pioneering reporters.

Haven’t participated in our book club before? Here’s how it works: At the beginning of each month I’ll announce the book we’ll be reading and the target pace. You can read along with me or simply tune in for the discussions. Throughout the month, I’ll be posting questions and topics for everyone to discuss. You can join in the conversation by posting your remarks in the comments section.

Tune in tomorrow for our first discussion topic: Starting at the Bottom.

Got a reading suggestion for the Legends Book club? Feel free to e-mail it to me at Erika (dot) Liodice (at sign) hotmail (dot) com.