Gordon Livingston has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 14 ratings. The most-rated is Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart.
Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart
Summary
From a psychiatrist who has spent the past 30 years listening to other people's most intimate secrets and troubles comes an eloquent, incisive, and deeply perceptive book about the things we all share, and which every one of us grapples with as we strive to make the most of the life we have left. After service in Vietnam as a surgeon for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in 1968-69, at the height of the war, 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, what works, what doesn't, and the limitless ways (most of them self-inflicted) that we have found to be unhappy. He is also a parent twice bereaved. In one 13-month period, he lost his eldest son to suicide, his youngest to leukemia. Out of a lifetime of experience, Livingston has extracted 30 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 24 others in a series of carefully hewn, perfectly calibrated essays, many of which emphasize our closest relationships and the things that we do to impede or, less frequently, enhance them. Again and again, these essays underscore that "we are what we do", and that while there may be no escaping who we are, we also have the capacity to face loss, misfortune, and regret and to move beyond them, that it is not too late.
©2004 Gordon Livingston (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC
And Never Stop Dancing
Summary
Dr. Gordon Livingston's national best seller, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, has drawn tens of thousands of readers who have embraced its 30 bedrock truths about life and how best to live it. Now, in And Never Stop Dancing, Dr. Livingston, a Vietnam War veteran, psychiatrist, and parent twice bereaved, offers 30 more true things we need to know now. Among the fresh truths Dr. Livingston identifies and explores are: Paradox governs our lives. Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. Marriage ruins a lot of good relationships. We are defined by what we fear. We all live downstream. One of life's most difficult tasks is to see ourselves as others see us. As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. Most people die with their music still inside of them. Once again, here are Dr. Livingston's sterling qualities: a deep understanding of the emotional tumult that courses through our lives, our hidden hypocrisies, desires, and evasions; an unerring sense of what is important (he does not waste a single moment writing about unimportant things); and his own ability to persevere, to hope, in a world he knows to be capable of inflicting unjustifiable and lifelong suffering. These qualities, plus his perfectly pitched sense of humor and a voice that has been described as "more Job than Dr. Phil" (The Washington Post), add up to another extraordinary book, one which, like its predecessor, offers us a gentle, generous, and unusual alternative to the trial-and-error learning that makes wisdom such an expensive commodity.
©2006 Gordon Livingston, M.D. (P)2006 Listen & Live Audio, Inc.
How to Love
Summary
The internationally best-selling author of Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, Dr. Gordon Livingston here helps readers discover fulfilling happiness. By recognizing and understanding particular character traits in ourselves and others, we can all learn who best to love - and who best to avoid. As in his previous books, here are Dr. Livingston's trademark gifts - an unerring sense of what is important, and what Elizabeth Edwards has characterized as "his unapologetic directness and his embracing compassion" - again deployed to provide listeners with a much-needed alternative to the trial-and-error learning that makes wisdom such an expensive commodity.
©2009 Gordon Livingston (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC
The Thing You Think You Cannot Do
Summary
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” (Eleanor Roosevelt) What are we afraid of and what can we do about it? Fear - of change, of intimacy, of loss, of the unknown - has become a corrosive influence in modern life, eroding our ability to think clearly. Exploited for power by politicians and for money by the media, it has become embedded in the way we think about our lives. Overcoming our fear, says Gordon Livingston, constitutes the most difficult struggle we face. Dr. Livingston, a psychiatrist, has increasingly found himself prescribing virtues like courage to his patients instead of tranquilizers or antidepressants. Here, he presents us with thirty truths that tell us all what we need to do in order to develop personal virtues in the face of societal - and our own individual - fears. And he does this with the crystalline prose and leavening wit that have made him an internationally best-selling author.
©2012 Gordon Livingston (P)2012 Oasis