Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now - Hardcover

Livingston MD, Gordon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569244197 ISBN 13: 9781569244197

Publisher: Marlowe & Company, 2004

Synopsis

After service in Vietnam as a surgeon in 1968-69, Dr. Gordon Livingston returned to the U.S. and began work as a psychiatrist. In that capacity, he has listened to people talk about their lives and the limitless ways that they have found to be unhappy. He is also a parent twice bereaved. In one thirteen-month period, he lost his eldest son to suicide, his youngest to leukemia. Out of a lifetime of experience, Livingston has extracted thirty bedrock truths: We are what we do. Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Only bad things happen quickly. Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing. The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas. Livingston illuminates these and twenty-four others in perfectly calibrated essays, many of which emphasize our closest relationships and the things that we do to impede or enhance them. These writings underscore that "we are what we do," and that while there may be no escaping who we are, we have the capacity to face loss, misfortune, and regret, and to move beyond them.

About this title

About the Author:

GORDON LIVINGSTON, M.D., a graduate of West Point and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has been a physician since 1967. He is a psychiatrist and writer who contributes frequently to the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. Awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam, he is also the author of Only Spring. He lives and works in Columbia, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From the foreword by Elizabeth Edwards:

"For the past eight years, Gordon Livingston has been one of the most important people in my life--and yet I have met him only once. Neither of us is young, but we are the beneficiaries of the communication mode of the young: we met on the Internet, in an online community of bereaved parents. He and a handful of others were just what I needed when my child died, people who truly understood the chasm into which we were all falling, trying--sometimes halfheartedly--to grab hold and stop the fall."

About this edition

• Publisher: Marlowe & Company
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1569244197
• ISBN 13: 9781569244197
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 169