Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153716 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback

Synopsis
The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.

Customer Reviews

Surviving the survivors
If one sign of a great work is that it breeds heated discussions -- Maus and Maus II certainly qualify. (By the way, everyone, the Nazi's were CATS!). Most of the objections I read from other reviewers seem to stem from the fact that this powerful, moving, and disturbing book does not promulgate their particular political agenda. Those of you who take offense should remember that this book is not a political history, but a biography. Even then, we should also note that the primary focus of this work is not the actual atrocities of the Holocaust, but in what came next. Art Spiegleman created this because he was trying to understand how his mother could survive all the horrors of a concentration camp, only to kill herself years later. In the wake of her suicide, Maus reveals itself to be a tale of how Spiegleman survived his mother's act of self-destruction, and in so doing, reveals much about all humans everywhere. (Also, let's never forget one thing, folks: A Comic Book won a Pulitzer Prize!)

Maus
There is a huge amount of holocaust literature available, lots of it well written and moving but this graphic novel packs quite a punch and is all the more engrossing because of its cartoon form.
I found it just as affecting as Primo Levi's books which is high praise indeed. I have lent this to family who, like me, found it gut wrenching but rewarding. And none of us read comics or graphic novels ever. If you don't either, make this the exception. Should be essential reading.

A work for our time
On first inspection, a comic strip depicting the suffering of the Holocaust through the use of 'cat' and 'mice' figures seems insupportable, almost laughable. However, the moment you begin to read the Maus collection, you are drawn into an incredible world, the world of the Holocaust, and become part of it. The mice become as real to the reader as their own family, the Nazi cats as terrifying as any living nightmare. Through the struggle to survivial of the Speigelman family, both during and after the Holocaust, the reader gats a real sense of what it is to have experienced such events, whether literally, or as a second-generation survivor. An amazing both, which is both hugely entertaining and surprising.