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

Biographies have never been a source of reading pleasure for me. They have always thrown me back to school days when I only skimmed biography's as source material for class assignments. They are usually to loaded with to much family pedigree facts, dates-dates and more dates not to mention people I don't care about and again pedigree's that bored me to death! This was not so much a biography as a late-in-life getting to know each other, rather almost a last ditch effort, in a son finally breaking down the walls of silence and both Mother and Son discovering each other.I must admit, I was already quite familiar with Gloria Vanderbilt and had read all that I could find on her after stumbling across the Poor Little Rich Girl historical documents quite by accident when I waa about 14 and have been rather a fascinated fan of her life ever since and was rather hoping to get a first-person account of her childhood and more tidbits of the glitz and glamour of her life. I knew who Anderson Cooper was and that he was her youngest child and very little about his CNN career as the political world has become a minefield and my respect for journalists had nose-dived in the last 10-15 years when they became less sources for news that purveyors of news as it pertained to their individual opinions. I was surprised to actually find him interesting and "real" and that this book held absolutely no political agenda. It was simply a story told thru correspondence from a Mother and Son and it moved me deeply! It made me question the possibilities of having this same experience with my children but mostly how much it might have helped me understand a Mother that I never was able to talk to, never understood and found I still carried resentments toward 3 years after her death and how it might have helped us bridge the gaps that neither of us were able to find in her lifetime. How much peace I could have maybe found if we had attempted something like this - done thru letters (or rather emails) since face to face talking always ended disastrous for us and how wonderful it might have been to have finally found a way to break thru those barriers and perhaps gotten to know a Mother I loved but a lot of the time did not like.I found the letters fascinating - full of important history - but more importantly such a sweet bonding experience for a famous Mother and her also famous son without the melodrama and last "kick her in the teeth" type of celebrity stories as biographies by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis's daughter's wrote about their Mother's after their deaths! This was felt more like a love story than a biography and I found it both saddened me (at my lost opportunity with my Mother) and made me feel warm & fuzzy at the way this strengthened their relationship as her life was winding down on its last years on this earth. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone - everyone!

This book was ordered for personal reading enjoyment. It arrived quickly and in perfect new condition.

What a life this woman has lived. Funny to see how she embraced the technology of today coming from the grandeur of her lifestyle and history.

WOW. What a great book and is worth a read. It’s sincere and everything that you would hope it would be. There are two aspects to this book, one is a candid conversation between a mother and a son, and the other is…well, a lot of the family gossip. It mirrors the conversations that many people hope that they have once in their lifetime with their own eldest family member, when they themselves are adults.It is a conversation, but done in the style of Anderson Cooper, almost being his own investigative journalist regarding his own family. However, unlike situations in which Cooper simply asks questions and keeps moving, he discusses his own responses, his own feelings, and explores elements from his own background and experiences. A great example is Cooper mentioning how he was afraid to tell his mom he was gay because of being afraid of how she would react because of the rumors that her own mother was gay. Instead the mother essentially responds with, “Yeah, I knew, all your friends were gay,” and does the motherly thing of refocusing on the question of her son regarding her own mother and discusses her mother’s sexuality and her own views on sexuality, which have changed over the years and views that it is fluid.There is also some really unique insights into the different family members, providing a history of each one as Anderson asks, going so far as to describe houses and ways that money was made. There is also a slight element of mother’s give a damn being broken at 91 and even letting her son know about sex and the firs time she no longer had to fake an orgasm, which was one of the attractive aspects of who she dated. This is also couched in the context on reflections of her own insecurities being a young girl and growing up, as well as why she stayed in some horrible marriages.The writing style of this book is easy and fluid. There are interjections in-between conversations that give a quick and easy reference to the backstory of a particular family member or some occasions of the family in general. There are also points where Cooper mentions that he watches a YouTube video that has a family member, or his mother, and it’s actually quite easy to look up that information and follow along. The responses of Cooper are often shorter, but pull in normal colloquialisms, something that shows a bit of a generational divide the two, such as YouTube; whereas his mother may respond with a quote, or just simply go off of the comment mentioned.Vanderbilt’s responses are much more elaborate, detailed, and a bit of a train of thought around an initial point Cooper asks and that his mother makes a winding way in telling a story, but this is for the best because it is in this portion you can see a lot of recollections about her life, where she has been, and her understanding in hindsight. There is a lot of brutal honesty as well, such as her own insecurities early in life, acknowledgement she probably was not the best parent, recognition that she and Cooper probably would have been closer if he was a daughter, the death of her husband (Cooper's father), and later the death of Coopers brother, Carter (her son).A great book all around, it gives insight into the family’s meeting of one another, Coopers’ own father, and clarifications on his own understanding of family gossip from years of growing up. There is a lot that may mirror experiences that some adults have been fortunate enough to have snippets of with a family member, but is the extended version of insight into a family that probably has a lot more gossip and rumors surrounding it than one’s own and a few more trips to Europe on whims than most people experience in a lifetime.

É um lindo resgate da relação mãe-filho.

An emotional journey of reading this book, an honest and most trustful conversation between a mother and son. So beautiful,

El día de hoy recibí este libro y la calidad es pésima. Todas las hojas mal cortadas, el tipo de papel utilizado es horrible

He is a great model of how people overcame and recovered from their trauma.

Interesting, well written, reflective and insightful and a book every adult child should read - I will be recommending this to people!