Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight

Henry Grunwald

Sep 2012 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Arthur Morey

About this audiobook

In 1992, when Henry Grunwald missed a glass into which he was pouring water, he assumed that he needed new eyeglasses, not that the incident was a harbinger of darker times. But in fact Grunwald was entering the early stages of macular degeneration -- a gradual loss of sight that affects almost 15 million Americans yet remains poorly understood and is, so far, incurable. Now, in Twilight, Grunwald chronicles his experience of disability: the clouding of his sight, and the daily struggle to overcome its physical and psychological implications; the discovery of what medicine can and cannot do to restore sight; his compulsion to understand how the eye works, its evolution, and its symbolic meaning in culture and art.

Grunwald gives us an autobiography of the eye -- his visual awakening as a child and young man, and again as an older man who, facing the loss of sight, feels a growing wonder at the most ordinary acts of seeing. This is a story not merely about seeing but about living; not merely about losing sight but about gaining insight. It is a remarkable meditation.

About the author

Henry Grunwald was the editor in chief of Time magazine and all other Time Inc. publications. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Austria and is the author of One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country. He died in 2005.