The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss

Anderson Cooper (b. 1967) is an American journalist and political commentator, the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN, and a correspondent on 60 Minutes on CBS News. He has worked as a journalist in many countries since the 1990s, including Vietnam, Myanmar, Somalia, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He published his first memoir, Dispatches From the Edge, in 2006. The memoir describes Cooper’s work in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Africa, and Louisiana, as well as his personal life in the past year, and was The New York Times’s top bestseller on June 18, 2006. His show Anderson Cooper 360° has received multiple Emmy Award wins between 2006 and 2020 and six GLAAD Media Award wins between 2001 and 2018. Furthermore, he received two Peabody Award wins for reporting on Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Arab Spring in 2012. He has also received a National Order of Honour and Merit from the Haitian government for reporting on the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Yale Undergraduate Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016, and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2018.

In The Rainbow Comes and Goes, Cooper reflects on the deaths of his father, Wyatt Cooper, and his brother, Carter Cooper.