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)

These comic books are so profound in so many layers. It takes you to the horrors of the Holocaust.and how little and yet heroic humans can be at the same time.

I had been meaning to read this for years, and I'm glad I did. Incredible and raw, the images are so well expressed. The themes are common knowledge, but the way it is depicted is unique and in a way visceral. I recommend this book, it's a page turner and eye-opener.

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.

Excellent. Scared my partner seeing the cover, didn't have a clue what it was, but it got us talking about what it was. Doesn't shy away from the real horrors that happened and never tried to make light of anything. A real man's experience also showing how it still affected him as he grew old. Genius in how it will encourage potentially younger readers to pick it up and still tells all that happened.

Comprei para o meu filho e ele simplesmente devorou o livro. Ele tem 10 anos e é fluente. Para quem não é fluente em inglês, recomendo a leitura da obra em português.

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.

This book is well worth the money. I found it very compelling reading and educational to boot. A full length graphic novel that not only confirms what we thought we knew about the holocaust, but forces you to think about all the people that were affected. Very deserving of the prizes and awards this books has received.

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.

good product and delivery