Dennis West

Westwords: Observations from the Desk of a Small-town Newspaper Publisher Dennis West

WestWords is a collection of columns by Dennis West that have appeared in The Beacon, a newspaper that covers the Walworth County, Wisconsin, area. The essays, most of which are humorous, contain a great deal of information, trivia and (non-caloric) food for thought. Among the subjects treated in WestWords are:* Pogo, the Old English Sheep Dog who was in the running for world's dumbest canine* The author's mother, a frustrated nurse who painfully injected her children with penicillin the consistency of toothpaste every time they sneezed* A musical career that ended when the author took a shot at playing drum major instead of his sousaphone and couldn't keep 100 University of Illinois band members from marching through a hedge* A Roman used-chariot salesman who invented a truth serum* plus essays about language misuse, TV commercials, heavy-metal music and much more. Add a generous helping of trivia and you have a humorously entertaining, informative and thought-provoking collection by award-winning journalist Dennis West, publisher and editor of a wildly popular small-town newspaper called The Beacon.