Anderson Cooper Reveals All To Access

After Hurricane Katrina, CNN?s Anderson Cooper made his anger clear and brought us stories from places you and I never want to go.

Now, he has a book about to debut at number one on the New York Times best seller list and a few stories to tell about himself.

?When you’re being told one thing by politicians, who were saying, thanking each other, for the relief effort, and yet everyday, you are not really seeing that effort on the ground,? said Anderson, shaking his head.

Anderson let officials have it from the flooded streets of New Orleans.

Literally, there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours and there’s not enough facilities to take her up,? he said during his coverage of Katrina?s aftermath. ?Do you get the anger that is out here??

Anderson truly made his mark when he boldy took our politicians to task during his coverage. It?s no wonder that for Anderson, it was personal.

?My dad was from Missisippi,? Anderson told Access. ?He graduated high school in New Orleans. He took me down there on book tours when I was a little kid, and all of a sudden, these memories from the past came flooding into the present, and it?s in part what motivated me to write this book.?

Anderson?s memoir, ?Dispatches From The Edge,? intimately shares the 39-year-old?s personal struggles from Anderson?s father Wyatt?s death when Anderson was only 10, to his older brother Carter?s suicide.

?I don?t think this was a rational act,? Anderson told us. ?It was really, I think, this impulse born of depression or born of some sort of irrational state.?

The 23-year-old Carter jumped from the family?s 14th floor penthouse ? in front of Anderson?s mom, fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt.

But Gloria and Anderson?s hardships have only strengthened their relationship.

She?s his biggest fan.

?My mom still records my show at night on VHS tapes,? Anderson told us. ?Literally, you open the closet door at her house and its filled with VHS cassettes of past shows of mine.?

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