One Year Short

Coloreds to blacks, queers to gays, tits to boobs, Miss and Mrs to Ms, Indians to Native Americans, retards to mentally challenged...these are just a few of the language and conceptual changes the Baby Boomers have gone through. As Billy DeRosa begins his life story from his vantage point of a sixty-six year old liberal Democrat, he feels cheated by his exclusion from the generation that spawned the Summer of Love. A wannabe Boomer, Billy DeRosa, bemoans his fate of being born One Year Short of inclusion in the country's largest, yet least exclusive, club. One Year Short is a work of autobiographical fiction that traces the Boomer contribution to US culture from 1945-2011 through the eyes of Billy DeRosa. What Billy eventually discovers through his recollections is a generation of consumers and followers, and occasionally a leader. Billy's story weaves its way with humor (quirky) and insight through his Catholic upbringing, the birth of Rock & Roll, the Civil Rights and Women's movements, the birth of environmental awareness, the Cold war, Kennedy's assassination, Vietnam and Iraq and much more. By the end of his tale he finds peace in his exclusion from a generation he thought he wanted to belong to, and happiness in his own Silent Generation, renamed by Tom Brokaw as the Greatest Generation.