Rating: 
Summary: Awesome. An amazing undertaking.
Review: I hate to use the word "awesome" because it has been so overused. However, I am awed that someone would even think to put the holocaust into comic form and then actually be able to pull it off.
I bought these books based on pure reptutation and I admit that they were not what I had envisioned. Although the title tells you that it is a "Survivor's Tale", I envisioned a more comprehensive view of the war and the death camps. Instead, the reader is drawn into a much more intimate world - we follow Speigelman's father as he maneuvers through the war-torn Poland and finally the death camps.
This is not a glossed over history. Spiegelman's father is not a saint - not during the war and not after the war. However, it makes the story all the more powerful, especially when his father's racist attitudes towards blacks in America. It drives home the point that the death camps were not a German problem, but rather a human problem. Books like 'Maus' are one of the best ways to remind all people that the potential is within all nationalities to commit the kinds of atrocities that the world witnessed in World War II and to guard against them.
Don't let the comic format fool you - this is powerful stuff delivered with a punch. Well done.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: This is a great format for such a moving story. The pictures allow the history to come alive. First rate. I'm not Jewish, and I think this would make a great present for anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Maus is a Liteary 'Passion
Review: Maus tells us brilliantly the personal tale of an exceptional
survivor of the nazi period. We now see other minorities being
targeted for destruction by states, such as the Tchetchens in
the Caucase, the Palestinians in Palestine (Judea-Samaria),
and a number of peoples in Sudan, and other parts of the world.The most astonishing part of the Maus story was to discover that the Nazi regime used the same criminal modus operandi in every country they occupied, by using the local police to arrest local people and organize local concentration camps. My father was in hiding from the French police, as much as the father of Art Spiegalman was from the Polish police. One day he
was caught, and spent over four months in a camp in Beaune-la-Rolande in North-Eastern France until he escaped. He never was the same ever after being starved almost to death, Polish prisoners told him to drink 95% alcohol to survive, he could not, I had to live with these stories all my youth, people do not realize what it means.
Rating:
Summary: Holocaust biography
Review: Maus is Art Spiegelman's comic book format biography of his father who was a Polish jew during WWII.
For me a great strength of Maus is that it doesn't sugarcoat things. I don't mean that it focuses on the horrible Nazis. They are there but because they were there during WWII, not because the author has an axe to grind. I mean that for example Vladick (Art Spiegelman's father) has all sorts of personality hang-ups like never ever throwing anything away. A good chunk of the story takes place in the present, so we see clearly Vladick's obsessive traits. As is implied these are probably the result of starving hiding etc for extended periods during the war. But that doesn't keep the aggravation these traits cause, especially for Art Spiegelman, from being shown.
There is a big focus on economics. In Auschwitz so many cigarettes equals a bottle of vodka - so many pieces of bread equals a shirt. Outside of the concentrations camps money (and indirectly food) is everyone's focus. People hide jews for money. People (including jews) turn jews in for rewards. Almost all of Maus is focused on getting by and not on kindness. As Vladick tells 5 year old Art in the opening pages "Lock them together in a room for three days without food and you'll see what it is friends"
So basically Maus is an up close glimpse into one family's experience with the holocaust. It isn't an overview. There is no attempt to connect Vladick's story to the "big picture" And the body of the book is free of statistics. That isn't a weakness. Maus is a biography, not a history book.
I recommend Maus. It is an interesting and gritty look at the holocaust from one family's perspective.
Rating:
Summary: You would be hard pushed to find a flaw..
Review: The Maus works are truly incredible, and I am not entirely sure I can add anything that hasn't already been mentioned in prior reviews.
On initial sight, this book did little to attract my attention. The illustrations are clumsy and far less refined than the graphic novel standard. However, once you start reading, this is soon forgotten as you are swept into this heartbreaking tale.
I am not sure I understand the concern with the animal caricatures, or the focus on Jewish history over the other suffering minorities during Nazi control. This is clearly a biography of a Jewish Polish man, who suffered because he was Jewish. It is only as bias as any biography, and this work should not be transposed into a non-fiction academic critique of the war. Thus concern over the drawings or the focus is completely illogical, because it is a personal tale with personal bias, and the fact that non-Jewish Polish suffered because of the war should not necessarily taint a Polish Jews' personal war experiences and perceptions.
Overall, it is spectacularly powerful and incredibly varied and presents a unbiased portrait of a man with undoubted flaws and nuisances, while linking this to his life experiences and his son's development.
Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: I am combining volumes one and two. Volume one is great and it is no wonder it won a Pulitzer Prize. Even if you are not fond of comics or graphic novels, if you are at all interested in history (or WW2 specifically), you should try this. I enjoyed it enough that I bought both for my mother-in-law, who likes reading non-fiction historical accounts.
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