Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by thesnackingbookworm
The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni
4.0
When writer Frank Bruni suddenly woke up with vision loss from a stroke in his eye, he wasn’t expecting all that he would gain.
While this “loss” (emphasis on the quotes) is the pivotal event of the book, it read more like a series of short stories all woven together by a common discovery by those who have experience life-altering changes; there is so much beauty to be found in the breakdown. Sometimes the breakdown is vision loss, sometimes it’s grief, sometimes it’s cognitive decline like in the case of Bruno’s own father living with dementia. Dusk looks different for all of us.
I love a good tangent and this book was a buffet of them: interviews with fascinating people like the blind architect, dance instructor and world explorer who have persisted and thrived despite vision loss, scientific dives into our brains’ wild ability to pivot and, my favorite, a series of anecdotes that cut the fluff of a deeper lesson and illustrate what it’s actually like to lose the senses we take for granted. I lost track of the times I looked up and though “Woah. I never considered that.” Like how, when going blind, you have to use your current stock of photographic memories as a catalog to refer back to to imagine the world, your loved ones and even yourself as if everyone’s age is sort of frozen in time.
One of my favorites asides was the chapter about how getting to know his recently-adopted dog, Regan, paralleled his own experiences of learning to live in the present and reevaluate what is actually needed to live a full life. Together, they slowly savored their days, one walking trail at a time, discovering the simplest beauty that was right there in Bruni’s backyard the entire time, before life forced him to slow down and bask in it. Being an unabashed dog lover who is constantly in awe of all that animals teach us, I could have read an entire book about this relationship between man and his best friend.
As a New York Times journalist of 25+ years and an esteemed journalism professor at Duke University, Frank Bruni has clearly already proven his writing chops many times over, but I will vouch for his storytelling anyway. The experiences of those he interviewed alongside his own is proof of our resilience that left me feeling hopeful and in awe of human resilience as I closed the book.
As one of his interviewees, esteemed Judge David Tatel who happens to be blind, put it, “Starfish regrow limbs. But that’s nothing compared to what humans do.”
Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway (and am so thankful for that!).
While this “loss” (emphasis on the quotes) is the pivotal event of the book, it read more like a series of short stories all woven together by a common discovery by those who have experience life-altering changes; there is so much beauty to be found in the breakdown. Sometimes the breakdown is vision loss, sometimes it’s grief, sometimes it’s cognitive decline like in the case of Bruno’s own father living with dementia. Dusk looks different for all of us.
I love a good tangent and this book was a buffet of them: interviews with fascinating people like the blind architect, dance instructor and world explorer who have persisted and thrived despite vision loss, scientific dives into our brains’ wild ability to pivot and, my favorite, a series of anecdotes that cut the fluff of a deeper lesson and illustrate what it’s actually like to lose the senses we take for granted. I lost track of the times I looked up and though “Woah. I never considered that.” Like how, when going blind, you have to use your current stock of photographic memories as a catalog to refer back to to imagine the world, your loved ones and even yourself as if everyone’s age is sort of frozen in time.
One of my favorites asides was the chapter about how getting to know his recently-adopted dog, Regan, paralleled his own experiences of learning to live in the present and reevaluate what is actually needed to live a full life. Together, they slowly savored their days, one walking trail at a time, discovering the simplest beauty that was right there in Bruni’s backyard the entire time, before life forced him to slow down and bask in it. Being an unabashed dog lover who is constantly in awe of all that animals teach us, I could have read an entire book about this relationship between man and his best friend.
As a New York Times journalist of 25+ years and an esteemed journalism professor at Duke University, Frank Bruni has clearly already proven his writing chops many times over, but I will vouch for his storytelling anyway. The experiences of those he interviewed alongside his own is proof of our resilience that left me feeling hopeful and in awe of human resilience as I closed the book.
As one of his interviewees, esteemed Judge David Tatel who happens to be blind, put it, “Starfish regrow limbs. But that’s nothing compared to what humans do.”
Disclosure: I received an ARC of this book as part of a Goodreads giveaway (and am so thankful for that!).