Twilight: Losing Sight, Gaining Insight

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. In Twilight, he chronicles his experience of disability: the discovery of what medicine can and can’t do, the clouding of his sight, the daily struggle to overcome its physical and psychological implications. This is a story not merely about seeing but about living; not merely about losing sight but about gaining insight.

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.