Dr. Gordon Livingston’s national bestseller, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, has drawn tens of thousands of readers who have embraced its thirty 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 thirty more true things we need to know now.

The fresh truths Dr. Livingston explores include: Paradox governs our lives. Forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. We are defined by what we fear. As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.

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; 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 singular voice — 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.