Frank Bruni presents THE BEAUTY OF DUSK: ON VISION LOST AND FOUND, with Molly Worthen

Presented by Flyleaf Books

Monday, March 7, 2022 – 7:30 pm (click here to purchase your book & ticket bundle via Eventbrite)

Your ticket covers admission for 1-2 people to this exclusive event and a hardcover copy of The Beauty of Dusk. Additional taxes & fees apply. We will contact you after processing your order to collect names for the attendance list. You will collect your book at the event. Masks are required at this event, and a signing line will occur after the talk. Please email info@flyleafbooks.com or call the store at 919-942-7373 if you are visually impaired and would like to substitute your copy of The Beauty of Dusk for a downloadable audiobook.

This event is off-site and will take place at The ArtsCenter at 300-G E Main St, Carrboro, NC, 27510.

From New York Times columnist and bestselling author Frank Bruni comes a wise and moving memoir about aging, affliction, and optimism after partially losing his eyesight.

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 The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly 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 uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them, and the tools we have for perseverance. 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. There was vision lost. There was also vision found.

Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than twenty-five years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a nationally renowned op-ed columnist who appeared frequently as a television commentator. He was also a White House correspondent for the Times, its Rome bureau chief, and, for five years, its chief restaurant critic. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the school of public policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and to produce occasional essays as one of the newspaper’s official Contributing Opinion Writers.

Molly Worthen teaches history at UNC, with a focus on North American religion and politics. Her last book, called Apostles of Reason, was about the intellectual backstory of the rise of the Christian Right, and she recently published an Audible Original called “Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America” that starts with the Puritans and ends with Oprah and Donald Trump. She is also a freelance journalist and writes about religion, politics, and higher education for the New York Times and other publications.