There are sections of Anderson Cooper's Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (HarperCollins) that make it hard to believe the anchor of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° went into TV reporting in the first place. The man has a knack for writing. But TV it was: Less than two years after his 1989 graduation from Yale, Cooper quit his job as a fact-checker at the news-for-high-school students station, Channel One, borrowed a Hi-8 camera from the station's director, flew off to Thailand, snuck into Burma, and interviewed students who were fighting the military dictatorship. "There's an immediacy to television that I like," says Copper. "I like writing. It's something that's always been important to me but I grew up watching a lot of television and a lot of television news. There's nothing more interesting to me than sort of figuring out where to point the camera lens and how to tell the story both in words and in pictures."