(CBS) Anderson Cooper is a bright star in the news business. And, it turns out, the news business helps him deal with the dark side of his personal life.

The popular CNN anchorman became a household name after his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.

But that wasn't the first time the seasoned journalist came face-to-face with death and disaster.

For years, Cooper has been covering wars, tragedies and destruction in countries that usually get little attention in the United States.

He writes about his personal and professional experiences in his new memoir, "Dispatches From the Edge."

In it, Cooper discusses seeing death and destruction covering stories in far-flung corners of the world, even as he tried to find meaning in the death of his father when he was only 10, and the suicide of his brother.

To read an excerpt, click here.

On The Early Show Thursday, Cooper told co-anchor Hannah Storm the book "came about for me in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and I started writing about a week after. In many ways, I'd been sort of writing it in my head for the last 15 years.

"But there was something about this sort of combination of the present that I was seeing, this horror and this tragedy, and the bravery and the compassion of the people I was meeting."

It wasn't the first time it had happened, but Cooper says there was a striking intersection between his personal and professional lives.

"I was surrounded by all these moments from my past," he said. "My father had lived in New Orleans. My father had grown up in Mississippi. I had been there with him as a child and he had died when I was very young. It was sort of this joining the past and present and I just started writing, and it sort of flowed from there."

Cooper's father was writer Wyatt Cooper, and his mother is Gloria Vanderbilt.

His was a fascinating childhood that he assumed was normal.

"It seemed normal to me at the time," he told Storm. "You know, my home life was very normal in many ways. We had a lot of — I met Charlie Chaplain when I was a little kid and Truman Capote used to be at the house a lot. I just thought they were odd characters. I didn't know exactly who they were.

"I said that, you know, there used to be — there's a statue of a great, great, great grandfather of mine in New York and I used to think that all grandparents turned into statues when they died. Obviously not the case!"

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