What do you think?
Rate this book
Seismic Events: Growing up with Tourette's in a Makeshift Family During the Pop Culture Explosion of the 60s and 70s
A seismic event can occur when tectonic plates buckle. Or when a family breaks apart and new ones are formed. Or when popular culture erupts overnight to create a unique landscape. Along the famous fault that runs down the San Francisco Peninsula, I experienced these dramatic shifts in my body, my family, and the world around me during the tumultuous and revolutionary decades of the 1960s and 1970s. A time when everything was shifting and a new world was being born.It was a dynamic and continually changing era. I watched the world around me morph in just a few years from the world of my parents and grandparents into the world we recognize today. During the same stretch, I saw my family situation change and reshape itself multiple times. Add to that, all the obstacles I had to overcome dealing with a neurological disorder on top of the everyday challenges of adolescence, and I can sum it up with the adage, never a dull moment.My mom and I were poor. We sold our house, moved into an apartment, and we were always one missed paycheck away from bad times. But I never felt poor because, during that time, a whole network of support sprung up all around us in the little courtyard of an apartment complex in San Mateo, and in the unlikely figure of an airline mechanic who would become a fixture in our lives. Together, this random collection of individuals would experience the dawn of a new age in one of the most exciting places on the planet and come together to form a community.
216 pages, Paperback
Published November 28, 2019
About the author
Dennis Venturoni
3 books4 followersI am a San Francisco Bay Area native, growing up in San Mateo in the 1960s and 1970s. For many of those years I lived with my mom at the Hillsdale Garden Apartments next door to the Hillsdale Shopping Center, and spent my youth as a mall rat. I went to Serra High School with Barry Bonds, and got my B.S. in business from the College of Notre Dame. In my college years I sold stuffed killer whales and rented baby strollers during the summers at Marine World. I went on to work in accounting and IT for many years before my lifelong love for writing took hold and I began to develop my second career as a writer recently.
I live in Belmont with my wife and daughter and our Shih Tzu named Whimsy. I have worked in various positions in IT for the past thirty+ years, more than 25 of those with Wells Fargo in San Francisco. I enjoy cooking, binge-watching shows, video games, target shooting, science fiction, classic rock, my favorite podcasts on history and the supernatural, and travel. I am a lifelong Bay Area sports fan of the Giants, Warriors, and Forty Niners. My bucket list when I retire includes visiting every continent and driving by car through the lower forty-eight states and Alaska.
https://dennisventuroni.com/
I live in Belmont with my wife and daughter and our Shih Tzu named Whimsy. I have worked in various positions in IT for the past thirty+ years, more than 25 of those with Wells Fargo in San Francisco. I enjoy cooking, binge-watching shows, video games, target shooting, science fiction, classic rock, my favorite podcasts on history and the supernatural, and travel. I am a lifelong Bay Area sports fan of the Giants, Warriors, and Forty Niners. My bucket list when I retire includes visiting every continent and driving by car through the lower forty-eight states and Alaska.
https://dennisventuroni.com/
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 12, 2023
I choose to read this book because my grandson was diagnosed with Tourette. I wanted to understand how my little guy would feel, see, hear and navigate the world of school and parents. When the author, Dennis Venturoni, didn't address what I wanted right away, frustration crept in, but his recollection of the living in the Bay Area, so familiar to me, kept me reading page after page. To put it simply, I really liked this book. The history, Venturoni's outlook.What a kid! To survive that dysfunctional family, oi! Of course, many of us had those dysfunctional family things, only at that time we didn't know as the author didn't. I was sad he wasn't diagnosed as a kid and had to suffer adult and the other kids cruelty as he jerked and twitched his way through school. Still! Dennis Venturoni found something good, something interesting, something to make life work. Wow! I see my grandson in a different light. He is that navigator too. Left-handed, a bit of a loner, but super friendly when he wants to be as he twitches and makes strange sounds. Anyway, finally Venturoni got to what I wanted and by then I had stayed up (too) late at night reading fun, great, sad, mad at some of his adults, - just so interesting. I highly recommend this book if you'd like to know about life in the Bay Area circa 1960-70s - very well recorded, author. His mother too, what a difficult life she had. A great work for Venturoni's family history. And, finally how to understand one withTourette. Thank you and congratulations Dennis Venturoni on your first book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review