The Books of 2023

Some of the best...

Winter Books to Read for the Holidays

Getting ready for the holidays!

12 October Book Reviews

This girl reads a ton of books!

Book Pick of the Week: Horror Dog: Man's Best Friend as Movie Monster

Horror Dog: Man's Best Friend as Movie Monster looks at the fascinating history of canines in horror movies and why our best friends were (and are still) painted as malevolent. Stretching back into Classical mythology, treacherous hounds are found only sporadically in art and literature until the appearance of cinema’s first horror dog, Sherlock Holmes’ Hound of the Baskervilles. The story intensifies through World War II’s K-9 Corps to the 1970s animal horror films, which broke social taboos about the “good dog” on screen and deliberately vilified certain breeds—sometimes even fluffy lapdogs.



With behind-the-scenes insights from writers, directors, actors, and dog trainers, here are the flickering hounds of silent films through talkies and Technicolor, to the latest computer-generated brutes—the supernatural, rabid, laboratory-made, alien, feral, and trained killers. ”Cave Canem (Beware the Dog)”—or as one seminal film warned, “They’re not pets anymore.”

Book Pick of the Week: The Wisconsin Supper Clubs Story: An Illustrated History, with Relish

The long history of Wisconsin Supper Clubs in this new book.

In The Wisconsin Supper Clubs Story: An Illustrated History, with Relish, the third in his popular series, Ron Faiola invites readers to pull up a chair as he regales us with more than a century of history behind this beloved dining tradition, guiding readers from London to Hollywood, to New York City, and finally, to his own home state.

The journey begins with the world's very first supper clubs, which emerged in London in the mid-1800s. The phenomenon was adopted by New York's restaurant and saloon owners in the late 1800s, and soon spread to suburban and rural areas. Across the United States, supper clubs enhanced culinary and dining traditions, and greatly influenced the evolution of live entertainment such as cabaret, comedy, and jazz, and dance crazes such as "The Charleston," "Turkey Trot," and the eyebrow-raising "Wiggle Wiggle."

Faiola unfolds the history of Wisconsin's supper clubs with stories of its most iconic establishments, such as Ray Radigan's, Hoffman House, and Fazio's on Fifth. He reveals the remarkable durability of the supper club tradition as it withstood WWI, the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Prohibition, the Great Depression, WWII, as well as the mid-twentieth century advent of fast food franchises and casual dining chains. Through their innovation and determination, supper club owners and their staff have managed not only to survive, but to maintain generations-spanning restaurants that remain prominent features of their communities to this day.

Great pictures and a ton of history and information.

https://bookshop.org/books/the-wisconsin-supper-clubs-story-an-illustrated-history-with-relish/9781572843035