Dispatches from the Edge

Written after a run of assignments that included Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Iraq war and famine in Niger, Cooper’s first book asks why a person keeps going toward catastrophe. He interleaves the reporting with his own history of loss, his father’s early death and his brother’s suicide, and finds that covering other people’s grief has been a way of processing his own. Raw and propulsive, it made clear there was a real writer behind the anchor.