Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant new take on a difficult issue
Review: I've seen dozens of very graphical documentaries about holocaust, I've read books and I've visited death camps. It has resulted in a mental overload making it hard for me to empathize with the immense pain and suffering that found place. By depicting the characters as abstract stereotypes, this gloom 'snuck in the back way' and made me use my own imagination to fill in the blanks. This hit me in a way that is unrivalled by any other book ever.It is the fact that the 'hero' of the story, the artist's father is an independent, intelligent and resourceful person on one side and a self-grandeurizing, penny-pinching racist on the other, makes it believable that this is a real person, and not an ideal image made to advance a stereotype and a political agenda. This is not necessarily the best book to learn about the horrors of the Third Reich, but it is an excellent 'fresh view' and a tremendous comic book by any account.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly powerful. A book you'll never forget
Review: After everything you've ever read or seen about the Holocaust, you still need to read this book. It's an experience unlike any other, because it's the only comic book (as a lifelong fan, I can't call them graphic novels, which I feel is only a term used to generate mainstream acceptance) ever created to specifically focus in on this issue and tell the story of a Holocaust survivor. And being a comic, Maus has advantages over just about every other medium of communication. The text allows Spiegelman to go into greater depth with his subject than film or television could. The pictures, and especially the sequential panel structure, allow Spiegelman to provide quick and dirty narratives at particular junctures, and allow the reader's imagination take care of the rest. And make no mistake, Spiegelman doesn't shy away from details of suffering in the book. Many such details are conveyed in matter-of-fact form, and somehow, that doesn't diminish their impact or the monstrous conditions the Jews lived in during the Holocaust. I'll never forget the one panel showing Spiegelman's young parents, hiding from the Nazis and starving, chewing on a piece of wood because "it feels like real food." Incredible. As an added treasure, Spiegelman often appears as a character in his own book and provides commentary on the book creation process and his relationship with his father. Incredibly honest and poignant, Spiegelman has created an unforgettable treasure. And if you're not going to read it for Vladek Spiegelman's moving story of survival and love for his wife, read it to find out that comics aren't just for kids anymore.
Rating: 
Summary: Animal caricatures misguided
Review: It's true that the Germans considered themselves, Jews, and Poles to be distinct races, almost different species. However, this book is told from the point of view of the Jews, not the Germans. Why would the Jews see Germans, French and Poles as three different species? Spiegelman ends up endorsing this super-nationalistic point of view despite himself. And making his wife a mouse - that's really a cop-out. It's hard to avoid the feeling that the mice are people, and non-mice are all some sort of monsters.
Rating:
Summary: Maus brought it all home
Review: Growing up Jewish, the Holocaust became an inevitable part of my identity. In school and in my brief religious education I've read book after book after book, seen documentary after documentary, explaining to me in gut-wrenching detail what happened to my ancestors at the hands of the Nazis. Sad to say, after so many accounts, so many black-and-white photos of skeletons and diary entries of anguished children, I felt like I'd seen it all. I thought there was nothing to surprise me about the Holocaust. Then, in seventh grade, my Hebrew school teacher handed me a box covered with cartoon pictures of cowering mice and towering cats. Inside were two slim red-backed books of cartoons. He said, "We're reading this in class. Go ahead and get a head start." I've read Maus I and II several times since then, and each time it surprises me with its understated power. It's an almost magical combination of words and images that coalesce into two--almost three--parallel stories: that of Vladek Spiegelman's survival and eventual liberation from Auschwitz, and his relationship with his beloved, slightly unstable wife Anja, who committed suicide after the war; and that of the progress of Vladek's relationship with his grown son Art, the author of these books. By recreating his parents' world, before and during the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman attempts to understand how those experiences shaped his father, and tries to come to terms with his own frustration in dealing with Vladek now, a stubborn, bitter, ultimately fragile old man. Spiegelman's cartoon images are brutal--not, for the most part, because they're horrifically graphic, but because the angular line drawings, the opaque shadows, and the humanoid animals lend a creepy surrealism to the stories. The Jews are mice; the Nazis, cats; the Poles, pigs; the French, frogs; the Americans, dogs...In one sequence, the cartoonist and his therapist appear as humans, wearing mouse masks, while stray dogs and cats wander the streets. Every once in a while, as a story ends, a series of drawings is punctuated by a dark, narrow sketch of Auschwitz's smoking chimneys. It's haunting. It's difficult to convey in words the scope and power of Spiegelman's depictions. For this jaded Jewish preteen, Maus finally brought home the impact of the Holocaust, not only the inhumanity and horror of death, but the lasting burdens carried by the survivors and their children.
Rating:
Summary: A daring format for a moving tale
Review: When I first heard about MAUS, I was among the most negative of skeptics. What did Art Spiegelman mean by producing a COMIC BOOK version of the Holocaust? Wouldn't this trivialize a great tragedy? How could anyone even THINK of reducing it to "Bam! Zap! Pow!" and other such stereotypes? The very idea offended me. Then I actually READ read the book -- and discovered how wrong my assumptions were. Let's face it, folks -- most books on the Holocaust are college level, heavy-duty reading. There are plenty of people out there who will never, ever plow through a thick historical tome, but who might just pick up a copy of MAUS and learn something. Academians may skoff at such things as "classics comics" and MAUS, but I have met quite a few high school students who admitted that MAUS was the only book on the Holocaust that they had ever bothered to read. For that alone, Spiegelman well-deserves the many awards and high acclaim that MAUS has received over the years. As for the story itself, the characters are well-developed, and the animal metaphors quite creative. (The Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, the Polish collaborators with the Nazis are pigs, etc. Also pay close attention to how the Jewish mice wear masks to "pass" when they must go outside from hiding.) Although this has been classified as fiction by some, the story is based on Spiegelman's interviews with his own father, and the incidents are authentic enough that, even if they are fictionalized, they certainly could have happened in real life. This is a story of genuine courage -- not the "Pow! Zap! Bang!" kind in superhero comics, but a tale of bravery just the same.
Rating:
Summary: A landmark comics work
Review: "Maus," Art Spiegelman's moving tale of the Holocaust and how it impacts a family a generation later, is hailed as a comics classic for a reason. It is a landmark work that transcends the term "comics." Through the seemingly absurd decision to use animals in place of people - Jews are mice, for instance, while Nazis are cats - Spiegelman manages to avoid coming across as heavy-handed, exploitative and melodramatic. The reader never feels that they are reading an educational tome with badly drawn people better suited for school than compelling entertainment. Instead, through the use of universal cartoon imagery, the emotional tug of the story is successfully conveyed. Two threads are woven throughout. The first deals with the Holocaust directly, from the years before Jews were taken to the camps and then to release. The second thread deals with Spiegelman's relationship with his father many years later, and that relationship's ups and downs as the author tries to get the oral history he needs to tell the tale of "Maus." All of the pain, confusion, death, turmoil and horror of the Holocaust comes home, as does the autobiographical tale interwoven throughout of the author's relationship with his father - who is also the central figure of Holocaust survival. Modern editions of this book ("Maus" was originally published in serial form) are generally produced very well. The two-book slipcase offered here is sturdy and attractive to look at. The pages are printed on thick, glossy stock. The black and white artwork really shines, every stroke visible and vibrant. Mine has been read multiple times and still looks great. "Maus" is compelling reading that requires no great love of comics to enjoy. History lovers, those interested in the Holocaust, and people who like stories about family struggles will enjoy this. Readers will quickly forget they are reading a comic, instead becoming wrapped up in the story Spiegelman has to tell. A highly recommended buy.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Tremendous
Review: The title of this review consists of words I don't use too often. But this is a masterpiece that deserved its Pulitzer Prize and then some. What makes Spiegelman's work so moving is the juxtaposition of a supposedly lighthearted form, the comic strip, with the greatest evil and suffering in human history, the Holocaust. Spiegelman's parents miraculously survived the concentration camps, being among very few survivors, getting by on luck and (in the case of Spiegelman's father) a lot of resourcefulness. This is their story, from the point of view of the father, who lost nearly all of his relatives. With the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, this work pulls no punches in describing the true horrors of the Holocaust, and Spiegelman's minimalist artwork makes the images all the more disturbing. You don't get this kind of emotion, terror, and brutal honesty in standard written accounts of the period. But underneath the direct suffering of the Holocaust, the true theme of this book is the lasting effects on the Spiegelman family, including the father's lasting agony and the mental illness shared by both Spiegelman's mother and himself, who hadn't even been born yet. The strained relationship between father and son are the true heart of this tremendous work. I haven't been this blown away by a work of literature in a very long time, if ever.
Rating:
Summary: Yet Another Sanctimonious Telling of the Holocaust
Review: This is yet another sanctimonious telling of the Holocaust. Maus is the blatant type of trivialization being taught to our children that leaves most unaware of the other victims of the holocaust. For American school children the Holocaust has become synomous with Jewish history. Maus simply reinforces most historical literature which focuses on the six million Jewish victims to the exclusion of the nine million Gentile victims. This book goes so far as to portray one of the Nazis other targets, the Poles, as fattened pigs going about their business unmolested by the Germans! There were three million non-Jewish Poles who perished in this tragedy, many trying to save their Jewish neighbors. Shame! "The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews, thus making them co-victims in a Forgotten Holocaust. This Holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms--namely, as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to the Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known. Little wonder that many people who experienced these events share the feeling of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, who anxious when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities." Richard C. Lukas, preface to The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944
Rating:
Summary: Anti-Polish Propaganda
Review: While this a moving account of one families experience during the holocaust, the depiction of Poles as pigs in Spiegelman's "Maus" an unfair and highly insulting caricature. Poles suffered horribly under Nazi occupation. No nations suffered worse. Six million Poles were murdered. Roughly half were Jewish and half Gentile. In fact exterminating Poles was also part of the Nazi master-plan. They were victims and to portray them as pigs is a grave injustice. While I read the reviews pointing out pigs have positive traits or are neutral animals, it is disingenuous to present the selection of the pig as representative of the Pole as anything but a slur. Germans are shown as cats. This is no wonder since cats chase mice. Apart from that, cats are quite nice animals. This, however, does not pertain to pigs. I suggest when reading this book you research the positive events in the 1000 history of Polish Jews. For starters, visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Over 11,000 'Righteous Gentiles' are honored; almost 5,000 are Polish. These are non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Rating:
Summary: Bad book
Review: This is probably the worst book i've ever read. If you are looking for a horrible book to fall asleep with, then wake up screaming at the horrible comic book format, this is perfect.
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