"Dewey The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World" by Vicki Myron

Dewey is a legend among library cats. In the world of library cats he reigns as the all-time champ because of the special characteristics that set him apart from all others. He consistently greeted every patron. He seemed to understand the needs and emotional state of everyone who came in, so he comforted the ones who needed his attention, and he stayed away from the ones who could not relate to him well.

Dewey arrived as a cast off someone threw into the Spencer, IA Public Library bookdrop on the coldest day of the year in January 1988. He was probably 2 months old and half frozen. Vicki Myron, Spencer Public Library Librarian, and her staff, nursed him back to health and gave him a home. For 19 years the regal Mr. Dewey reigned over the Spencer Public Library. He became a fixture not only of the library, but a symbol of the determination and will of the whole community. He became famous world-wide. Film companies from as far away as Japan came to tell his story.

When Dewey was felled by a tumor at age 19 the library received thousands of messages of sympathy from all over the world.

The book documents a remarkable series of stories about the life and times of Dewey the cat and his role within the community. While the book is about the cat, it also documents the relationship between a beloved pet and his caretaker, and her relationship with the community and her family.

It is a heartwarming, charming story in the tradition of "Marley and Me" (which I saw in the movie theater this weekend.) I highly recommend it to all cat lovers and library lovers.

Liz Nichols

"A Long Way Gone," by Ishmael Beah

Beah's book is a memoir of this young African's years as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone. It is a brutal, sad tale of how children are exploited and dehumanized in order to become canon fodder for adults who have political or greed-related ambitions in so many third world countries today. It is also an inspiring tale of redemption for a fraction of the more fortunate children who are able to be rehabilitated.

Beah's tale starts out in the gold mining region of Sierra Leone where he and his brother grew up living with his father. At the age of 12 rebel forces attacked his town, burned down all the homes and attacked the people. Many were killed, while a few boys were pressed into service. Ishmael, his brother and several friends managed to escape and started a very long journey walking towards the coast and away from the fighting.

Everywhere they went they were treated with suspicion, since so many boys had been recruited to be rebels. They were just stray refugees trying to get away from the fighting. A couple of times they were brought before tribal chiefs and were very nearly executed as spies.

After months of travel by foot and occasional stops in friendly villages, they reached what they hoped was a peaceful community when they were captured by army forces and pressed into service. The process of brutalizing the boys, plying them with drugs so they would act in robotic fashion, and the unspeakable acts of violence that they were forced to commit make this book a difficult, but very powerful read.

Eventually, Ishmael and several other boys are mustered out of the military by a UNICEF inspector, and given a second chance to be children at a school for rehabilitated war orphans in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Eventually, Ishmael is repatriated with his uncle's family on the outskirts of the city. Ishmael is chosen to go to New York City to attend a conference on child soldiers and meets the woman who will eventually bring him to the U.S. permanently and adopt him.

Before the happy ending, though, is more fighting, this time, within Freetown, which sets the boy to fleeing again several months after he returns to Sierra Leone. A harrowing journey to Guinea leads eventually to a chance to contact his benefactress in New York City and a new life.

The memoir is a remarkable piece of writing for someone who spoke primarily Krio, an old slave version of English brought to Sierra Leone by the black colonists from America who settled the land in the late 1700s. Ishmael was able to complete his high school education in New York once he emigrated, and then attended Oberlin College in Ohio.

He is still a very young man, in his late 20s, and is working in the field of humanitarian relief.

This book was chosen as the One Community, One Book selection for this year in Iowa City, and it has been a very inspirational, and thought-provoking choice.

Liz Nichols

Mildred Kalish's "Little Heathens"

I like social history. That was actually my major field of study during my college years. While I was growing up everyone thought I would have been best suited to have lived during the wagon train era in the 1840s, or as a member of the "Little House" family.

Mildred Kalish has documented her childhood during the depression years on a farm and in a small town in northeast Iowa. That's an era in American social history that has not been over-explored, and I think it is a pivotal era. The depression shaped the values of those who grew up in that period. I could see so many traits familiar from my mother and her Iowa family roots in so many of the stories that Kalish tells.

Kalish recounts family stories about thrift, using everything without any waste, family closeness, discipline, modesty, the farm work ethic, social life and entertainment, pets that very probably will end up on the dining room table some day, one room school house education, and the list of interesting topics goes on and on.

This is a well written memoir that is devoid of sentimentality and is highly descriptive. When you are done reading you'll hold the Urmy family in admiration and have a much better understanding of the Iowa farm experience in the 1930s.

Liz Nichols