Rating: 
Summary: Ignore the ramblings ...
Review: ..., ignore the blather about how the whole "Animal Farm" metaphor--Jews as mice, Germans as cats, etc..--being racist and demeaning.Art Spiegelman attempts to tell the story of his father Vladek's life in Hitler's Europe. By and large, the book is a detailed, objective retelling of his Vladek's story. However, as Art himself will realize, "I can't even make sense out of my relationship with my father--how am I supposed to make sense out of the Holocaust?" and "Reality is much too complex for comics--so much has to be left out or distorted." Thus liberated from the impossible standard of complete objectivity, Art is free to insert two important subjective elements into the story--the depiction of different races as different species, and the insertion of himself as a character in MAUS. Obviously, Art is not a overt racist--in fact, in the second part of MAUS, Art will scold his father for distrusting a black person, and a German-Jewish couple will help Vladek return home after being freed from the death camps. The point of portraying Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, etc. is to show what race relations during Hitler's Europe might have been like. The characterization of race doesn't end there, though--as the scene shifts from Nazi Germany to the present, and as Art must suffer the daily trials and tribulations of life with a father permanently scarred by his experiences, Art depicts himself as a mouse as well, a confession that he himself is unable to completely escape the aftermath of the poisoned race relations of the Holocaust. Maybe this makes him a covert racist. But if he is, then who isn't? Art's involvement in MAUS goes beyond interviewing his father, though. Later in the story we will see that Art was treated in a mental hospital and sees a psychiatrist regularly. As the book cover declares, "MAUS is a story about the survivors of the Holocaust--and of the children who somehow survive the survivors." The storytelling in MAUS is stellar, and the craftsmanship is as well. The comics medium allows Spiegelman to employ some interesting tricks. For example, whenever Vladek is trying to sneak around, he is portrayed with a pig mask. When Vladek and Anja are trying to escape from the ghetto, Anja, who in real life was easily identifiable as a Jew by her appearance, is drawn with a long tail, while Vladek is not. In sum, MAUS is a gripping story of his parents' experience during the Holocaust, filled with countless brushes with death, tales of betrayal, and plenty of terrible, graphic illustrations of victims being executed. It is not a history text in the most austere and empirical sense. Rather, it is a confession that the Holocaust defies dispassionate and detached analysis.
Rating:
Summary: A Simple Review of a Great book.
Review: I had to read both of the Maus book as a summer assignment for school so i wasn't expecting to enjoy them as much as i did. Basically the central theme of the book is the Holocaust but it goes beyond just the Holocaust, it takes you to the years before and then you can really understand the gradual decline of Europe into WWII and it's just not "another Holocaust novel." The author shows the effect of the Holocaust on his parents, Anja and Vladek and it makes you physically sick to read the vivid details and see the pictures which are really simple drawings. The drawings give you and even better perspective on the roles certain groups of people played during this time and really leaves an open door for you to deciepher the meaning of the "animal metaphors."
Rating: 
Summary: self-absorbed to the point of racist
Review: A number of people complain that Spiegleman depicts Poles as pigs, but this specific misuse of the "animal metaphor" in the book isn't the fundamental problem. The problem is indicated by the very idea of depicting human beings of different cultural backgrounds as different types of animals, at all. It is one symptom of the disease Speiegleman clearly has; an obvious belief in his own artistic and cultural superiority and that of those who share his opinions, a worldview that is nearly as offensive as the Nazi madness he presents in the book. It doesn't help that he is a terrible illustrator and a mediocre writer. Go read Joe Sacco's absolutely wonderful books if you want real objective reporting in comic format. Read Sacco's Palestine and see if the Jews are always the mouse and never the cat--like all humans, they contain both within them. This makes Spiegleman's trivializations of our SHARED fundamental humanity all the more obvious and Maus look all the more offensive, whether you are Polish, German, Jewish or whatever.
Rating:
Summary: Of Mice and Men
Review: I first read Maus in a college bookstore in Auckland, New Zealand. I was searching for a textbook and came across the first volume of Speigelman's 2-part series completely by accident. Feeling somewhat nervous about a comic that portrays Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, I nevertheless picked it up. Two hours later, I was standing in exactly the same spot, oblivious even to the bookstore clerks who were trying to shoo me out. I was riveted, disturbed and moved by this incredible piece of literature. Maus is by turns informative, evocative, funny and brutally honest as an account of how one man dealt with the "feckless thuggery" of history. When one compares Maus (vols. 1 and 2) with all the heroic nostalgia surrounding World War 2 that is coming out in popular culture these days, one is immediately struck by some interesting contrasts. In movies such as Saving Private Ryan, the filmmakers and audiences all emphasize the visual accuracy or "feel" as paramount. However, if we leave aside the grand patriotic narratives and the bloody violence, there is very little left. We are not really shown what the effects of the war actually were on people's lives. Realism, it appears is limited to the battlefield. Maus on the other hand, makes no claims to visual realism. This is in fact the strength (as others have pointed out) of Spiegelman's approach to the complex, multi-layered subject of his father's experiences as a Holocaust survivor. By making the surface of the narrative explicitly transparent, Spiegelman can take us deeper into the tangled and haunted inner worlds of both Vladek and Art himself without the distractions of "visual accuracy". By using the comic medium, Speigelman can actually present multiple story lines and conflicting accounts without sacrificing their emotional impact. His treatment of discrepancies between his father's memories of Auschwitz and those of other prisoners regarding the famous orchestra at the gates, is one excellent example. His depictions of Jews as mice, Poles as pigs and Germans as cats are another exzample of masterful condensation of meaning, bring up volumes of deep background with nary a word written. Some of this is made a little more explicit in Maus II where a reporter asks Speigelman how he would draw Israeli Jews and he replies "I have no idea ... porcupines?" It's this kind of self-awareness that makes Maus a masterpiece on many different levels. Make no mistake however, for all its "non-realism", Speigelman's depictions of starving, panic-stricken prisoners packed into cattle-cars or the piles of dead and dying are no less brutally evocative than the photographs taken by Allied cameramen on the liberation of the camps. His eye and hand are brilliant, his ear and pen unsparing in his depiction of history, himself and his father. I just read an article in the New Yorker regarding Lt. Colonel James Thompson, who was the longest-held US POW in Vietnam. One of his psychiatrists describes Thompson as someone who was able to survive by constructing a personality that was in the end, crushingly maladaptive to living "back in the world". Re-reading Maus and Maus II, one can see the same kinds of process at work with Vladek. I will be using Maus" in one of my college-level courses on Race and Politics. In my opinion, Maus, is much more effective than Spileberg's "Schindler's List" in conveying the immediate and ongoing human costs of the Holocaust, along with beautifully understated evocations of the political and cultural background in Europe in which it took place. I had the privilege of hearing Art Spiegelman speak a number of years ago. At the discussion he played part of a fragment of his tape recorded conversations with his father. Hearing Vladek's actual voice after hearing it in my head for so many years was both strange and wierdly familiar. Speigelman has given his father (and himself) a way to speak out across generations and cultures to bring you face to face with some of the most difficult and unnerving issues in the human psyche and our collective human history.
Rating:
Summary: The Nonfiction of a Giant Mouse
Review: Art Spiegelman's book, Maus, defies definition. Using a comic book format with talking animals of the comic tradition, the author narrates his father's life during the Holocaust. The talking animals, however, are not funny, so "comic book" is another weak description of Spiegelman's work. Some have called Maus a graphic novel, a form developed in the 1980s that transcends comic book tradition to address more significant issues. But Maus isn't fiction, at least not in the traditional sense, although the New York Times initially placed the book on its fiction best-seller list and later moved it to its nonfiction list at the author's request. (Spiegelman tells a story about a debate among the editors as to the book's classification. One of them wanted to ring his doorbell. He said, "If a giant mouse answers, we'll put Maus in nonfiction.") So, is Maus a graphic novel or a comic book? Is it biography? Autobiography? Nonfiction prose? Memoir? Perhaps its classification doesn't matter. That Maus defies pigeon-holing and breaches preestablished ideas of what literature should and shouldn't be is what's important. One thing is certain--the effect breaks you down and takes you by surprise. After reading it, you won't forget it.
Rating:
Summary: Maus is the best Survivor story!
Review: I have read both books. I read them in only a couple of hours but they really dragged me in. I thought Art did a good job of displaying emotion and what the characters were really like. He has come along way from being a not-so-knowns illustrator to a well known Jewish story writter. I say keep up the good work ART!!
Rating:
Summary: Stunning.
Review: Incredibly, this story could not have been told in any other medium - it had to be in comic form. Vladek's story is amazing and horrible, and though he did not die in Auschwitz, perhaps he did not survive. Speigleman captures his father's horror, and lack of horror in chilling detail, often with little editorial input. I reread both books almost monthly, and never tired of putting voices to the drawings. No simple review can wrap-up the power of these little drawings, or of Vladek's calm recall one of the most regretable events of the last century. Compelling, frightening, powerful and addictive.
Rating:
Summary: Simply THE best book on the holocaust
Review: Art Spiegelman's book, "Maus", is an incredible oral history of the holocaust. It is, by far, one of the most intimate chronicles on the holocaust. The symbolic choices of characters (mice- jewish, cat- german) is incredible, as is the unfolding drama of Art's father's experiences throughout the holocaust. Truth be told, I knew almost nothing about the holocaust until I read this book. Suddenly, it dawned on me that our history books have seriously overlooked this major event in world history. I have decided, when I become a classroom teacher, that I will use "Maus" as a required reading for my history courses. I believe it will appeal to the students, for several reasons - the main one being that the book is written/drawn in a comic strip format. I finished the book in one night. The minute I started reading it, the author had me hooked and my interest totally immersed in what would happen throughout the story. This is an incredible book - one that appeals to all audiences - and should be made mandatory reading in the school's curriculums. A fantastic read!
Rating: 
Summary: Gross Trivialization
Review: I love comic books. I love works of history. But I cannot stand this work. As much I enjoy comics, they are inappropraite to use for such horrific things as the Holocaust. Spiegelman then makes things worse with his cat-mouse-pig allegory. I'm offended that he sees Jews as mice, and wish he had used humans as humans. It doesn't help that he's a lousy artist. But to reduce the Holocaust to a comic book? It's so trivial. I also cannot stand Spiegelman, and the psychobabble he throws in about himself and his relations with his father and wife are close to repugnant and self-serving as well. He's a mediocrity, a man who lambastes Judaism and the comic book super-heroes I love with regularity, who thinks he's so great, and who then points at the topic matter and screams, "this is ART!" I suppose if anyone learned about the Holocaust from this when they wouldn't have otherwise, it's a worthwhile product, and maybe it's a good thing that it helped to bring the idea of a comic book so respect. But history, especially this history, demands a much more serious treatment and a much less arrogant historian. Adults who want to read about the Holocaust needn't waste their brain cells on this when there is so much out there. Comc book fans are better off just reading a good old silly super-hero book for fun and then trying real literature afterwards for the history. There are many more worthwhile ways to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust without reading this.
Rating:
Summary: Mind-Boggling
Review: One of the best "holocaust books" ever written.
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