A world of pain

I have just finished Anderson Cooper's "Dispatches From the Edge".
It is the story of how a little boy's heart broke, so that he decided to bury the pain deep within. Little did he know that you cannot bury one feeling without burying most others as well. Carrying this well of pent-up emotions, feeling cut off, he spent years going to the worse places on earth, hoping to learn how other people dealt with overwhelming pain, and how they survived it. He frantically ran away from his internal demons by facing death and loss in their worse forms, and only the most extreme conditions made him feel alive.
In 2005, the dam finally broke. The long denied pain came seeping out, then rushing out, and the man finally reconnected with his emotions and himself, in an excruciating but life-saving hurricane of grief.

Anderson is very candid in giving us access to the pain he kept repressing. He explains how he had compartmentalized his life in order to handle it. But the truth is, we can't help but feel he has opened but one compartment in this book. The box "loss, death and grief" is generously shared. But it is not enough because we guess there is a lot more to Anderson than what is revealed there. We never get a sense of who he really is, what makes him get up in the morning, what he loves and hates. This book is a splendid display of opening up while at the same time keeping a huge part hidden. And Anderson fails to ever rise high above his experiences in order to view them in an all-encompassing perspective. Perhaps it is because, as he says, "he doesn't wear his opinions on his sleeve", but what better place than this book to have and express one's opinions? If he has developed mottos, convictions, a philosophy of life, after all he has seen, he doesn't share them.

What's more, for those who have followed his career closely, the book offers little new material. Between the segments on his show, the Details articles, the interviews and articles published about him, and his parent's books, most of what's in "Dispatches" has already been published or aired. However, there's probably only a minority of people who followed him this closely. It is very well written and twice, his narrative reaches literature level.

We close the book full of compassion for him, and hoping he has finally come full circle, that his life will now be different and he might no longer have the compulsion to cover the worst disasters our world has to offer.
Still, while seemingly baring it all, Anderson manages to keep us at arm length.