Rainer Maria Rilke

"Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,-it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments, and joys."--Rainer Maia Rilke


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Sunday, March 31, 2013

You Don't Have to Love Cats to Love this Story

Dewey the Library Cat:  A True Story by Vicki Myron

Memoir/Biography

I did not expect to love this book.  I expected it to be cheesy and silly and trite.  But it was not and I loved every word of it.  As good as any dog book I've ever read.

That's saying something seeing as how I am not a cat person.  I don't particularly like cats.  I mean, I have one, but we are not what you would call bosom buddies.  He seems to be more a taker and I'm more a give, so it's an unbalanced relationship.  Unless, of course, he wants something.  Then, he's all over me but I can tell he's just using me.  Dewey reminds me a lot of my cat.

In this sweet story, we meet Dewey who was a small kitten left in the book drop of a small-town Iowa library and rescued by the librarian on the coldest night of the year.  What follows is the story of how one little puffball of a kitten captured the hearts of the librarian and the entire town.  Dewey was a hit that soon turned into a phenomenon that hit newspapers, magazines, and TV news around the world.  It seems so implausible in this litigious age that a library would even be allowed to keep a cat!  Of course, all the best stories start off with the implausible and impossible made real. 

This is a cat with a great deal of charisma and a story so endearing and so hopeful.  A story of the little library that could--how a town and a kitten and a woman all helped one another, if only for a little while.

You do not have to be a cat lover or a book lover to love this book.  A streak of sentimentality and a hope for the goodness of mankind is essential, though.  I am not ashamed to admit that I cried like a baby for the last half of the book.  I especially loved the descriptions of combined biblio- and cat-therapy.

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