A Few Good Reads

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

I just finished this biographical memoir by Anderson Cooper, whose career I've followed since I was an inquisitive and nerdy 13-year-old in junior high that actually enjoyed the daily broadcast of the Channel One News program during homeroom. Now he is a well-known and well-respected CNN foreign correspondent who has literally seen it all.
What I will take away from reading this book is how difficult it truly is to see firsthand the worst of all human experiences and remotely try to make sense of them without any knowledge of the gospel. Truthfully, some parts of the experiences he recalls having were very difficult for me to read (for example, the accounts of the children dying of starvation in Africa) because I am so emotionally and metaphysically invested in those types of issues. Anderson is very candid and honest about what it is like to see such tragedies as dead bodies on the streets of Iraq or complete devastation of the southeast Asian islands after the 2005 tsunami. But what impressed me the most is how at the end of his recollections, amidst the well-written and knowledgeable conclusions about the complexity of life on this planet, Anderson finally deals with the open-ended tragedies of his own life and realizes that losing himself in the world's devastations is not what helps the human soul to heal. He realizes that he is no longer drawn to the most dangerous parts of the world to simply escape having to face his own reality, but that he goes to those places because, in some small sense, he can finally relate to the pain he witnesses on those distant, foreign soils.

I WOULD LIKE TO READ THESE NEXT:



"Mormon Scientist" is a new book about how science and faith can co-exist and contribute to our understanding of truth both temporally and spiritually....can't wait to read this.....it will take me back to my days as an undergrad at BYU.

"Bare Branches" by Valerie Hudson (and grad student Andrea den Boer) was published after I had graduated from BYU but I had a chance to attend one of her lectures on the political climate of China and its effects on the population and I was quite impressed by her research in this area.