Excerpt: 'Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival'

ByABC News via logo
June 19, 2006, 11:59 AM

June 21, 2006 — -- Known primarily as the prematurely gray television host and correspondent, Anderson Cooper chronicles his travels as a dedicated reporter in a new memoir, which covers such events as the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

The sorrow he suffered when he was young -- Cooper lost both his father and his brother while still a child -- help make this memoir a riveting story of personal triumph while also offering readers an insight into the life of a journalist.

Read an excerpt from the memoir below.

Excerpt: "Dispatches From the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival"

Small waves, one after the other, lap the shore. Two Sri Lankan villagers walk along the water's edge, searching for bodies washed up by the tide. They come every morning, leave without answers. Some days they find nothing. Today there's a torn shoe and a piece of broken fence.

I'm standing in a pile of rubble. Beneath me the ground seems to move, twisting and turning in on itself. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The ground isn't moving at all. It's maggots, thousands of them. Writhing, squirming, they feast on some unseen flesh. Nearby, a dog with low-hanging teats and a face smeared with blood scavenges for scraps. She steps carefully among scattered bricks, tourist snapshots, china plates, the flotsam and jetsam of life before the wave.

Shock waves pulse in all directions, displacing millions of tons of water, creating giant undersea waves. A tsunami. A ship on the surface of the sea would barely have noticed, detecting perhaps some slight swells no more than two feet high. But underneath, out of sight, churning walls of water extend from the ocean's bottom to the surface, pushing outward. The water moves fast, five hundred miles per hour --