Near the end of Anderson Cooper's book "Dispatches From the Edge," he writes that "I've started to believe in signs and magical thinking." The line delighted me. More than once, reading Cooper's book, I thought of Didion, and her book "The Year of Magical Thinking."

I'll come back to that, after noting that I liked Cooper's book quite a bit, and there are plenty of passages that would-be journalists should study. He's especially good about the emotional component of covering disaster zones, and I was reminded that it was Cooper's personal connection to viewers that made him a CNN star. It also explains a lot about why he replaced the chillier, more professorial Aaron Brown. Cooper knows how to touch people viscerally.

One notable passage:

   It was my first trip to Sarajevo. 1993. The first year of the war. A woman was shot crossing the street, near Sniper Alley. .. I followed (the woman and people helping her) to the hospital and into the ER. The doctors allowed me to shoot footage for a while. They were well versed in the kabuki of cameras, but no longer believed that anything about the situation in Bosnia would change.

   "What picture has not already been taken?" a man in the ER asked me. "What haven't you seen? What don't you know? What remains to be said?"

Here's another section I bookmarked, from his Katrina accounts:

  I don't want to go back to New York, to my job, to the way it used to be. Stories about missing coeds in Aruba and runaway brides, stories that titillate but aren't as important. … I want to yell at (friends), "Don't move on! Don't go back to your normal life, get caught up in the petty falseness you see on TV!" It's the same feeling I had weeks after my brother died. I was back at school, and everyone else seemed to have forgotten.

Of course, as a host of a nightly news show, Cooper hasn't exactly gotten his wish about the stories he covers. Here's a recent CNN release: "In her first U.S. television interview since the birth of her daughter, Angelina Jolie spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper about her work with refugees in Africa and around the world as well as the birth of her daughter in Namibia last month. The exclusive interview will air on Tuesday, June 20, as part of a special edition of Anderson Cooper 360° marking World Refugee Day from 10 p.m. to midnight (ET).  Jolie sat down with Cooper for nearly an hour earlier this week in Los Angeles."

But here's another passage from the book:

   They die, I live. It's the way of the world. … I used to think that some good would come of my stories, that someone might be moved to act because of what I'd reported. I'm not sure I believe that anymore. One place improves, another falls apart. … No matter how well I write, how truthful my tales, I can't do anything to save the lives of the children here, now.

There's more, but you should just go ahead and read the book. I don't think the use of the word "Dispatches" in the title is casual, because it reminds me of Michael Herr's "Dispatches," a classic memoir of Vietnam, which was also about covering a terrible situation. I don't know if Cooper has read Herr, or Didion, but they echo in his prose.

Didion especially. Part of that comes from the current of grief in Cooper's book, which has him facing the loss of his father and brother, blending his personal emotions (and withholding of them) with the agonies he has seen as a reporter. Didion's "Magical Thinking" is also about grief, from the death of her husband, but I also felt in Cooper's writing repeated nods to Didion's journalism, to her use of detail as social commentary. Didion was generally subtler, though equally barbed, as Cooper, but Cooper's on-page voice is just as compelling.

I also admire Didion and Cooper on a more basic level, because they are able to face their dealings in a forum where all the public can pay witness. Sure, a lot of people are willing to talk in a way about demons in their lives, notably celebrities indulging confessional urges about their (presumably past) substance abuse. But those accounts often feel as if they are still skimming over a surface — I made a mistake, I paid a price, and now a clip from my new movie — where Didion and Cooper are digging deeper. I envy them their ability. Plenty of us manage to avoid confronting our pain privately, let alone in a forum as lasting as a book.

Joan Didion has done a remarkable thing with her book, something many authors long to accomplish. She has described a universal experience by sticking to specific, personal details.

As I noted in the last post, "The Year of Magical Thinking" describes what Didion went through following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, on Dec. 30, 2003. His sudden, unexpected death was not the only burden Didion had to shoulder, as it came while their daughter, Quintana, was in an extended battle against life-threatening illness.

Someone who turns to writers for solace and explanation, Didion quotes often from poetry and research studies as she tries to get through these paired trials. But she also takes us deeply into her own reflection, despair, angry, confusion and search for understanding and explanation of what has happened. Time and again, what I read echoed in what I felt after my first wife's death, whether it was in Didion's wondering if she could have done something more to save her husband, or her seeking signs in their pasts, or her expecting to discuss something with Dunne — only to remember that he was dead.

She even went through seemingly contradictory behaviors: on the one hand being unwilling to get rid of some of his belongings (out of the belief that he might yet return and need them) and avoiding things that reminded her too much of their being together.

Been there, done that, I thought more than once. And I felt it more forcefully than I have from other books I have read about loss and grieving. Didion gets to those been-there/done-that moments for everyone by avoiding the grand statement. She is not interested in telling us how everyone else will feel. She is interested in telling us what she felt, and how she thought her way through it, and the grandeur comes in our recognition of her pain.

I read the book somewhat slowly, because I had to set it aside now and then to absorb what it said, or to think about the parallels to other lives, including my own. I expect to read it again.

Of course, Didion is a writer I have gone back to before, rereading essays in "Slouching Toward Bethelehem," say, or "The White Album," just because I liked her writing and her point of view. (My first wife was also a Didion fan. I still have two copies of "Slouching," one that was hers, and one that she gave me.) I have also read, and reread, a lot of Dunne's work. But this book is one that I know I will revisit for more than just the writing, and the story of two writers I admire. It's a magnificent piece.