Books

By Cheree Cleghorn, Editor

This is a very good day to get a small book by a very wise doctor and read such truths as that one.

I was fascinated by the elegant simplicity of this one of thirty “true” things this book title promises. Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now. The author, Gordon Livingston, M.D., is a psychiatrist. His life has been struck by adversity—the deaths of two sons. He also has encountered life’s other hazards: divorce and a sense of personally failing those he loves, for example.

This best-seller isn’t a new book but it is one for these times.

This one true thing is about life’s most important questions. When you strip away all the details, the drama and any distractions, every decision comes down to these two: Why? Why not?

You know about all the self-help books which have 10, 20 or even 25 questions so that you can figure out what you want to do or how you want to do it. Child-rearing books. Self-help books. They tend to re-complicate things much of the time. Besides, people fudge. They know the answer they should give so they do. Some help that is.

He makes a powerful case for the reality that there are only these two questions. Answer these and you’re there.

“Of all the forms of courage, the ability to laugh is the most profoundly therapeutic.”

This, too, is a profound insight. Have you ever thought of laughter as another form of courage? I haven’t seen it that way but he is persuasive. I am not going to spoil your reading by giving you the pay-off, the real reason he thinks that laughter is courage, perhaps disguised.

By now, you should be interested in any book that has still more for the reader than these two “truths.”

This is not one of those books that tells you what you already knew.  Instead, the author distills the essence of what he has learned from working with people who have problems painful enough to bring them to his office door.

One measure of a non-fiction book is this: How many things did you read here you never saw anywhere else? Or, if you have seen the concept elsewhere, does the writer bring more light to the topic? A fresh perspective you are glad to have?

He offers that and more.

That said, most readers likely will finish the book clearer and feeling more grounded.

Dr. Livingston knows the face of adversity and he knows how to stare adversity down in any of its forms.

Just the right book for right now.

Book:  Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now, by Gordon Livingston, M.D., Lifelong Books. $12.95.