The Beauty of Dusk
On Vision Lost and Found
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes “a book about vision loss that becomes testimony to human courage, a moving memoir that offers perspective, comfort, and hope” (Booklist, starred review).
One morning in late 2017, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni woke up with strangely blurred vision. He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether.
In this “moving and inspiring” (The Washington Post) memoir, Bruni beautifully recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions.
The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately “a positive message, a powerful reminder that with great vulnerability also comes great reward” (Oprah Winfrey). Bruni’s world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. The Beauty of Dusk is “a wonderful book. Honest. Poetic. Uplifting.” (Lesley Stahl).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times columnist Bruni (Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be) imparts in this generous memoir the wisdom he learned after he began to lose his eyesight. One morning in October 2017, Bruni woke up with blurry vision, only to later discover that a stroke had destroyed the optic nerve in one of his eyes, leaving the other eye vulnerable to a similar fate and Bruni at risk of total blindness. "t made me tremble, tested me and forced me to see in a new way," he writes. Coming to terms with his new reality, Bruni delves into the emotional, psychological, and social tolls of losing his eyesight, while musing on the experience of aging, connecting his story to the way Joe Biden's age was discussed when he was running for president. Despite being widely considered as past his "prime," Bruni argues that the septuagenarian candidate "defied the naysayers": "what Biden lacked in zip, he made up for in zen." It's a compassionate take on growing older that, when combined with sanguine insights on living with compromised vision, illustrates Bruni's knack for writing about the unpredictable beauty of the human condition. Smartly mixing memoir and cultural criticism, this movingly speaks to an entire generation.