The Complete MAUS: The Pulitzer-winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust - by the author who transformed the genre

After watching Nerdwriter1's video essay of Maus I was very interested in buying the graphic novel, and honestly that video couldn't fully describe the joy I felt reading it. It's been a while since I've read Maus so bear with me while I recount what I can remember about it. Maus follows Art Spiegelman interviewing his father Vladek Spiegelman about how he survived the holocaust. The characters, including Art himself, are drawn as anthropomorphic animals in a style that's very unique. Each animal corresponds to a certain group in the graphic novel: the Jewish as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, and the Americans as dogs (I don't remember if other groups like the British are depicted). This stylistic choice is very important: it's reclaiming the style of propaganda that the Nazi's used to depict the Jewish (in particular how they dehumanized the Jewish by depicting them as pitch black rats. The mice in Maus are the opposite being the colour white). The story as a whole is Vladek's experience during Europe's most horrific time, his other stories like how he met Art's mother, with Art's experience and stories coming in from time to time. In fact, one part that focuses on Art's experience is one of my favourite parts of the whole comic, which is the start of the Time Flies chapter until about page 207. It's a very personal and raw look at Art's perspective on his family's life, on Maus itself a bit, the dogged interviewers and greedy licensers he had to deal with, he solace when going to his therapist, then it capped off with a lonely sigh as the tape played Vladek's last issue with his wife and then continued with the story. The whole comic is honest, real, and poignantly written, and the beautiful ink pen drawings add so much to the story. I won't bore you with a full analysis, I'll just say it's absolutely beautiful and now I want to read it all over again. (Also, it upsets me dearly that some people would ban Maus from school libraries cause it has swastikas...in a WW2 story. Yeah. Any school that has Maus on their shelves deserves my respect)

Haven’t read it yet i got it today but it looks amazing the quality is great the art is great and its just rly good

I am a student of the Holocaust, having heard my dad tell of his role in liberating the camps when he was in the US army medical corps as they swept through the devastation of Germany and Poland as the Nazis were being defeated. I am also a native Tennessean, embarrassed and angered by a certain Tennessee school board for banning this hook. But had they not done that, I might never have read it! I didn’t think I would be a fan of a ‘cartoon’ book. Was I ever wrong! The tale of Nazi hatred of the Jews is exactly that told in many another history, detailing the horror and inhumanity of the outrageous purge of an entire people. My father was a photographer, too, and as a young boy in 1950s Tennessee I discovered his photo albums: the gas chambers, the ovens, the stacks of bodies, the surviving living skeletons in striped pyjamas. He sat me down and explained it in terms a young boy like me might understand. I went on to become a teacher, and was glad to lead units of study of the Holocaust to middle and high school students, and to lead visits to Auschwitz and Terezin so that we could see for ourselves what inhumanity could and did do. This prize-winning book is beautifully arranged, easy to follow, and non-putdownable. It so wonderfully portrays the lives and deaths of the unfortunate victims of Nazism. That a Tennessee school board could ban this book because of one drawing or one phrase expressing outrage at Nazi behaviour simply shows their ignorant rightwing lack of empathy. Yet, their actions have had a good result in making more people buy and read the book, people like me. Hopefully people like you. The world is not rid of racial prejudice, intolerance, religious bigotry, warfare…MAUS needs to be read as a history lesson that teaches us today that it could happen again, as it might be in Ukraine now, and in other places where intolerance and self-righteousness lead people into acts of deprivation and pain. This book is essential reading.

I see I'm not in a minority in posting a favourable review for this eloquent graphic novel. It's not a genre I've read much of, but this is a superb showcase for it. For those as yet unaware, Spiegelman's books are here combined, so this is the full volume telling the story of his parents, Vladek and Anja, and their families, and their endurance of persecution as Polish/Jewish citizens in WWII. The narrative is in effect telling the story of how he recorded his father's memories and the process of deciding how best to depict them. Vladek Spiegelman's story is not dissimilar to that of many millions who suffered, but his son's retelling here is moving, honest and even funny. Art's frustration with his ageing father's penny-pinching, for example, is humorously drawn even while Art is questioning whether this extreme behaviour is caused by experience of the ghettos and Auschwitz. It might seem obvious to us, but he knew many other veterans of the camps who were different. Right from the beginning we are told that Anja committed suicide in 1968, while her student son was in the midst of a mental breakdown, and while this isn't further explored, it's as much a book about the far-reaching, long-term consequences of genocide as it is about what life was like in occupied Poland. The final and obvious thing to say is that the characters are all depicted 'Animal Farm' style as creatures, denoted by race as mice (Jewish), cats (Germans), pigs (Polish), frogs (French), dogs (Americans) and moose (Swedish). (There are a couple of fish in there too but I wasn't sure who they represented - Canadians?!) This has raised objections from some quarters, about the connotations of portraying various nationalities as these particular creatures, but for me it was clear that Spiegelman's objectives were to highlight the absurdities of racial discrimination - there are points in the story where Vladek is seen to wear a pig mask, pretending to be Polish, and Art's French wife Francoise asks whether she will be drawn as a frog or a mouse. Needless to say there are 'good' and 'bad' characters depicted among all the races and what ultimately emerges is a portrait of a war not of race against race, but of humanity fighting tyranny, bigotry and despotism in the worst circumstances imaginable.

Containing both volumes 1 and 2 of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, The Complete Maus tells the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman’s experience of surviving in Hitler’s Europe. The first and most important thing to make note of is that this is a completely true story. It isn’t a piece of fiction based in the truth of Auschwitz, it is a true account of Art Spiegelman’s father’s life during World War II. It is a heavy and intense read, but completely incredible. The second important thing you need to know about this book is that it is a graphic novel. It is masterfully drawn, with plenty of narration which makes it easy to read even if you’re not a regular graphic novel reader. The metaphorical representation of people is a massive part of this book. Jews are drawn as mice, Nazis as cats, the Allies as dogs, and Poles as pigs. This is an incredibly effective commentary on stereotypes, and highlights the absurdity of dividing people by nationality. The brutal honesty about life as a Jew during the Nazi occupation is shocking and horrific, but truly, truly fascinating. On another level, the relationship between Art and Vladek is also explored, and it really shows how the children of survivors can be so affected by the experience of their parents. Maus isn’t an easy or pleasant read by any means, but it is powerful and it’s essential. If you’re into graphic novels, you MUST read this book. If you’re into historical accounts and memoirs, you MUST read this book. If you read anything at all, you MUST read this book.

I really hoped I'd be giving this five stars,based on other reviews and following in interview with the author I heard on Radio Four. There is much to admire in this book, but ultimately I didn't find it as involving as I'd expected, hence the four stars. This is a book more for the author to expel his own demons than it is for the reader, but it tells a good story very well, and makes good use of the medium. A critic suggected that Spiegelman can't draw, but unless DaVinci has an e-mail account wherever he is, then few are able to criticise the drawings, which are, I think, marvellous. The harsh black and white drawings elevate the stoy and ensure it jars the reader repeatedly, not letting go. It's interesting that perhaps the most emotionally involving part of the book for me is the effect his experiences had on Spiegelman's father post-war, something we don't get exposed to so often, and in itself making the book important. The caricatures of different races by means of animals must be difficult if your race is represented, but it is at the very least a way of ensuring we know who's who in a medium where it would often be less than obvious otherwise, and a number of the caricatures have historical or folk reference. Everyone knows- or thinks they know- the story of the holocaust, but this did open up a few corners I wasn't previously aware of. One could link this to Animal Farm, in making a complex story accessible, but I don't think that's entirely fair, as Spiegelman covers the story only factually, and the animal characters are there for very different reasons than in Animal Farm, where the characteristics aim to be functional and social more than racial. On top of that, I read Animal Farm to my children when they were very young, but I wouldn't necessarily offer them this; there are better introductions to the horror. At the end, this is a fine work, skilfully executed; and highly recommended.

This book, which transformed the graphic novel genre, sheds a deeply personal light on the horrors of the Holocaust, as experienced by the author's father, Vladek. Vladek survives the Holocaust through a combination of sheer luck and his entrepreneurial capacity to wheel and deal his way out of trouble. But survivor's guilt and trauma turn him into an irascible and tormented old man, testing the patience of his son who sets out to record his experiences. The horror and insanity of the Holocaust are graphically described, and this book should be essential reading for all young people trying to understand what happened - it is a great shame that some libraries in the US have been denied permission to stock this remarkable and important book.

A legendary and iconic graphic novel. This is an important and must read biographical story. Wonderfully illustrated, simple and too the point.

Jamás había llorado tanto con un cómic, una historia increíble, la edición en pasta dura es bastante buena, de buenísima calidad y las hojas también son increíbles. Merece completamente la pena, la mejor compra para empezar el año.

La historia del holocausto judio contada por sus victimas y supervivientes. Spiegelman narra el sufrimiento de sus padres y resto de familia durante la ocupación nazi y la segunda guerra mundial utilizando la novela gráfica como via narrativa. Imprescindidible. Para comprender una pequeña parte de la historia del siglo XX. No te dejes engañar por la caracterización animal de los personajes. La obra destila el sufrimiento humano y refleja como se pueden llegar a comportar los seres humanos, y como quedan marcados todos.

Series Info/Source: This is the complete Maus graphic novel. I got a copy of this as a Christmas Gift. Thoughts: The dense writing style and heavy lined black and white artwork were a bit intimidating at first but once I got started reading the story I didn’t even notice it or find it hard to read. This story is completely engrossing. Spiegelman does an amazing job of alternating between the past and the present and recounting the intense and sad story of his father living through the Holocaust. What amazed me is he did in a way that was incredibly impactful without ever being too dark. I was completely engrossed in this book from page one. And I quickly grew to love Maus’s father and his family. I was continually surprised how much of Maus’s father’s survival was because of how resourceful his father was. His father is extremely adaptable and takes on every chance he has to learn a new skill, this (along with quite a bit of luck) is the number one thing that leads to him surviving the nightmare of the Holocaust. Is this an uplifting book? Not really, it is more of a cautionary tale. Even though his father survives the Holocaust, the effects continue to echo through his life many years later. The people who survived the events of the Holocaust have to live with the Holocaust forever in their minds and this continues to affect their families generations later. So much thought and skill went into telling this story; it was just incredibly well done. There is some irony to the fact that I asked for this for Christmas and then shortly after it was banned in Texas because of inappropriate content. I don’t know how to tell people this…but the whole Holocaust was inappropriate and it would be really hard to tell an accurate story of what happened without going into some of the violence and death that happened. Is the violence and death presented in an excessive way in this book? Most definitely not. Discussions of the gas chambers and killing of children in the streets of ghettos are addressed matter of factly. Hiding in piles of dead people’s shoes and witnessing the aftermath of a gas chamber are things that really happened. At the time these people were trying to survive one atrocity after another; the atrocities were fact and they are presented as such in this book. People did what they could to keep themselves and their families safe. Should you have your five year old read this? Well do you want to explain the Holocaust to your 5 year old? I might hold off for a bit. We talked about the Holocaust with my son in late elementary/early middle school. He actually checked out this very book from his middle school library and had A LOT of questions for us after he read it. They were excellent questions and we had some very good and thoughtful discussions as a family because of this book. This is a incredibly valuable way to learn about the Holocaust. I think it should be available for everyone in middle school and older to read. My Summary (5/5): Overall I was incredibly impressed with this graphic novel and the amazing job it did blending the past of the Holocaust with the effect it continues to have on people’s day to day lives. I would recommend to middle grade and up readers because the Holocaust is a complicated topic and kids need to be a certain age in order to begin to comprehend cruelty on this scale. Is this book excessively violent or “Inappropriate”? No, not at all. It addresses the topic with excellent candor wrapped into an incredibly engaging story of one man’s survival of these horrific events.

Due to the condition description as "good" I was worried this was a used item. It looks or is brand new, I cannot see that anyone ever touched this book. Great item, thanks.

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