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Book Reviews
A strong, wise soul
DEWEY:
The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
By Vicki Myron and Bret Witter
288 pp. Grand Central Publishing $19.99
Reviewed by Doris Pavlichek
It was huddled in the front left corner of the [book drop] box, its head down, its legs tucked underneath it, trying to appear as small as possible. The books were piled haphazardly to the top of the box, partially hiding it from view. I lifted one gingerly for a better look. The kitten looked up at me, slowly and sadly. Then it lowered its head and sank down into its hole. It wasn’t even trying to appear tough. It wasn’t trying to hide. I don’t even think it was scared. It was just hoping to be saved.
If you have a cat-loving bone in your body, the steady gaze of the long-haired orange tabby on the cover of Dewey will soon lead you to scoop up this book, find a seat in the corner of the bookstore’s café, and get to know this cat. But Vicki Myron’s memoir/animal biography is not your typical maudlin animal tale; this is a substantial book about how a cat repaid a town for its kindness and humanity.
As the excerpt above illustrates, Dewey starts life as a throwaway, stuffed into the book drop of the Spencer Public Library on a bitterly cold night in Iowa. Myron and her staff take him in and pour on TLC. Before the morning is over, Myron—the library director—has determined that the cat might be just the thing her library needs.
It was 1988, and Myron fills in the history for us, giving us the context in which Dewey entered the lives of his caretakers and patrons. Factory farms were beginning their efficient rise, and small-time farmers were losing the homesteads that had been in their families for generations. In addition, a major employer—Land O’Lakes—had left town in 1985, after which the library opened a job bank. Still, Spencer began to experience negative population growth as people left for greener pastures.
The little stray, christened Dewey Readmore Books, became the morale boost the town needed. Whether the visitor was a widower or a child, a job hunter or a housewife, Dewey found a way to connect with each and every one.
Starting with local news reports, Dewey’s story eventually spread throughout the world, putting him a role in Puss in Books, a documentary about library cats, and a Japanese documentary in which he appeared for a whole minute and a half, landing Spencer, Iowa, on the world’s map. Any magazine that featured cats featured Dewey in an article or two. People came from all over the world to visit the library—just to see Dewey! Though Myron was surprised that people were going hours out of their way to see a library cat, Dewey was not. He treated each visitor with friendliness and excitement, as though he or she were the most important person in the world to him.
Myron wonders at her cat’s fame. She feels that in Spencer itself, Dewey’s story “resonated with the people. . . . Hadn’t we all been shoved in the library drop box by the banks? By outside economic forces? By the rest of America, which ate our food but didn’t care about the people who grew it?” His story also resonated with the world at large, inspiring people with the love he freely showed to everyone he met. The little cat didn’t single-handedly turn the hard times of Spencer around, but he provided a needed distraction, as well as something positive and joyous to his neighbors near and far.
Making this book part memoir, Myron gives us a few glimpses into her own personal struggles in this book. At the point when she meets Dewey, she has been a single mother for some time, divorced from an alcoholic husband. Though she and her daughter ended up accepting welfare for a while, she earned a bachelor’s degree and eventually a graduate degree. In addition she suffered multiple health problems, including an emergency hysterectomy and a radical double-mastectomy. During Dewey’s tenure at the library, Myron suffers complications and delays in her reconstructive breast surgery, which leaves her in pain and in need of a friend like Dewey who can listen and tolerate her troubles. Dewey, himself, suffers for years with digestive health issues and many vet visits.
Though this is a delightful book overall, there were a few things that bothered me. As a pet owner, I can’t imagine why Myron resorts to home-care for an obviously underweight, hypothermic, frostbitten, and dehydrated kitten on that first night, though clearly it all worked out in the end. She also spends more time than I felt necessary going into the history of Spencer and of the library building itself. These areas, while important, were too long. I also wanted to get to know Myron a little better—her struggles and illnesses, how she overcame juggling work, school, health problems, and motherhood along with being the driving force behind library reform in her town. She seems to hold back the details, perhaps displaying the stereotypical Midwestern stoicism.
Nevertheless, she portrays Dewey’s long, remarkable life very well in this book, leaving me to wonder if every library and bookstore shouldn’t have a “Dewey” who can give us unconditional love when we need it. Dewey was a strong, wise soul who enriched the lives of everyone he met, much like Myron herself, who turned things around at the library, making it a cornerstone of a battered community. It is apparent that the two of them needed each other, and the town of Spencer needed them both. When Dewey became gravely ill just a couple of weeks past his nineteenth birthday, Myron and her staff repaid Dewey’s kindness by gathering around him, saying tearful goodbyes, and gently letting him go on to that big library in the sky. Long may he greet newcomers at the gates.
Doris E. Pavlichek holds a degree in communications and is a technical writer by trade. She’s published two books on network engineering, poetry in the StrokeNet Newsletter, and historical non-fiction in Constellation magazine. She assists with biannual poetry readings at the University of Maryland in College Park. Ms. Pavlichek resides in Frederick, Maryland, with her husband, two English Bulldogs, and three cats.
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