Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus, #1)

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Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus #1)

4.35 of 5 stars 4.35 · rating details · 81,375 ratings · 2,270 reviews

Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon, succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through t...more

Paperback, 159 pages

Published August 12th 1986 by Pantheon (first published 1986)

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Jan 05, 2013 Ceridwen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: america-and-environs, books-about-books, grandparental-overshare, memoir, comics

Grandpa and I are standing by the wooden fence that holds my cousin's horses. They aren't skittish, but they stand just out of reach and flick their ears with watchfulness and flies. It's full summer in Wisconsin, all grass and the scritch-scritch of insects in the grass. We talk about my cousin and her riding, about horses. I've always played city mouse to my country cousins, which is slightly fraught because my Grandpa is a man who has definite ideas about right living which center on small to...more Grandpa and I are standing by the wooden fence that holds my cousin's horses. They aren't skittish, but they stand just out of reach and flick their ears with watchfulness and flies. It's full summer in Wisconsin, all grass and the scritch-scritch of insects in the grass. We talk about my cousin and her riding, about horses. I've always played city mouse to my country cousins, which is slightly fraught because my Grandpa is a man who has definite ideas about right living which center on small town life. He is second generation Danish from a small town in Iowa, and while he is fiercely progressive in much of his life philosophy, he retains a certain near-stoic near-asceticism which doesn't mesh with my nuclear family's outlook. I knew, even as a child, not to talk about certain things certain ways with Grandpa, how he would...maybe not misunderstand, but certainly not respect our city life. And our city life is the detached single-family suburban sprawl of Minneapolis, so city is certainly relative.

I'm not sure how we start talking about this, but we get onto the subject of SSRIs - drugs like Prozac which affect brain chemistry, which were, even when this conversation occurred, being prescribed like candy. Grandpa was a doctor in the Navy during the War, and then attached to the nascent Marines, the raiders who would go out on lethal missions onto the scads of tiny islands between Australia and Japan. He doctored for both battles of Guam and Guadalcanal, in addition to an unremembered number of conflicts spraying out into the Pacific Rim. He never much talked about the War, least not to me anyway, but I was a child and there was no place for those stories. We knew there was something wrong when the stories started, stories that had always been stoppered, for better or for worse, by my Grandma's almost harsh pragmatism. My Grandma runs family mythology like knitting, the way she knits anyway, the quickness of her hands in sharp contrast with how bent and gnarled they are by long-term arthritis. "Chris," she would say when he started in a vein she didn't approve of, and then quick deflections into topics more tractable. When he could or did ignore her machinations, which are at Sun Tzu levels of mastery, it was an indication of a deeper wrongness. Senior dementia was in the process of erasing him year by year until he was somewhere near six in the year his mother died, at the piano she taught him to play before she left him. It stops my heart still to think of how much pain he still carried from her loss, ninety years later on the eve of his passing.

Here, I knew that the process was beginning, but not where it would take him. Next to the wooden stile that penned my cousin's horses, we're talking about Prozac, and about medicine and psychology and all of that. He's been retired for a long time, over a decade, maybe more like two. I know he worked for years at a low income clinic after his retirement. Eventually he had to let his medical licence lapse because there is so much need out there that he kept getting sucked into the brutal hours of doctoring he had enjoyed his entire working life. I run the line about how pharmaceutics are not candy, and SSRIs are being used to treat grief like grief is unnatural. He agrees, in the sense that his view of psychology has always been based on will. He is a man of his generation, and getting over it is as getting over it does, and they did. Unless they didn't.

I sure wish we had had something like that during the War though.

I was getting ready to ship out again. I had already done a tour in the South Pacific. The ship was in the process of filling up with soldiers, many of whom had not seen action, who were just out of basic training with their squeaky boots. But there were a number of soldiers who had seen combat, piling back onto a ship that would bring them back to that. One man snapped. He was in full gear, with a 70 lb bag on his back. He saluted - ten hut! (Here Grandpa snaps a salute.) And then walked off the edge of the ship into the water. Soldiers scrambled, throwing off their own gear and diving in to water to fish him out. He was screaming uncontrollably. They hauled him off to the brig because that was the only place they could contain his breakdown. His screams reverberated through the metal bones of the ship until someone knocked him out with phenobarbital, but he'd just start screaming again when he came to. All those young men just out of basic listened to the ship they were boarding scream. We had no real way to treat the injuries in the mind.

This isn't the voice of my Grandpa. This is me trying to remember him as hard as I can, but it keeps slipping, and I am too much me to recreate him. If you could see me, I could recreate with my body which has some of his genetic tendencies the way he laughed and held his hands and hunched, but it wouldn't be exactly right, two generations and a gender displaced from him, all those years displaced from the War, the years from this conversation, the years from his death. So much is gone. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck - I had never heard anything like this from him. I have the vague sense that there was someone else there, maybe a younger cousin, but it might have been me simply blown out of myself with shock. We would hear more war stories as the years wore on. My sister and I would collect them and show them to each other. Did you hear the one about the shelling on the beach? About running the wrong way during a retreat and almost ending up on the wrong side of the line? "Hey doc," the rear guard said, "Where're you going?" I wish, in a way, I'd tried more diligently to collect them, but I know it was an impossibility. He became so frail, and there's no way Grandma would allow that line of questioning, even if I'd thought it was a good idea.

Which is why Maus towers as a narrative about familial and historical traumas, about the way we talk to our parents and grandparents about the fucked up shit they had to endure out there in the ugly mess of history. Art Spiegelman and I are not real similar people; our parents and grandparents did not have the same experiences; we are not from the same places. Spiegelman's parents, Polish Jews, survived Auschwitz. Maus is the strange lapping recounting of that survival, his dad on a exercise bike or fighting with his second wife, Art fighting hard against his father's disapproval and the memory of his mother's suicide. The story keeps folding on itself, Art drawing panels which his father sees and then comments on, this secondary conversation through the oblique public performance that keeps collapsing the narratives, rendering it all into this wash of the meaningful and unmeaningful acts that make up our familiar conversations. It puts me on a wooden fence with my Grandpa who had begun his long, slow erasure of memory to his death, and beyond. It's bananas.

It's so fiercely honest, not just the history, but the ways Art and his dad fail to connect at times. I loved my Grandpa, of course, but sometimes he was a difficult and rigid man, and the ways Spiegelman captures the affection, respect, and complete irritation with our loved ones was perfect for me. My Father Bleeds History is uncompleted, the elder Speigelmans just committed to Auschwitz, and Art and his father just beginning to talk more openly about the comic Art is creating. Of course I'm reading the second part the second I get my hands on it.

Me and Grandpa about a year before he died, at his 94th birthday celebration

Me and Grandpa about a year before he died, at his 94th birthday celebration

Cross-posted on Readerling (less)

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Apr 15, 2013 Kruti rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nf-memoirs-or-biographies, comics-manga-graphic-novels

Some books will leave a sour taste in your mouth. Some will uplift your spirits. Some will even touch your heart. And some…some have the power to rip your soul into tiny little pieces and leave nothing but a shell in its place.

Who knew a graphic novel could hold such power? But that’s exactly what happened.

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Having finished Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, I feel like I just sparred against a two-tonne elephant with no means of escape. Each hit was worse than the last until I reached the end fee...more

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Mar 26, 2009 Chandra rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoir, 2009-reads, graphic-novels-comics, favorites, history

Who'd a thunk a 'cartoon' about Nazi cats and Jewish mice would be a heartbreaking and gut wrenchingly profound read? I sure didn't. You'd think the Pulitzer Prize might have clued me in. Today is the day that I officially stop underestimating graphic novels.

The way that Art Spiegelman intersperses his father's gripping survivor story with their present day uneasy,bickering relationship is pure genius. His honest portrayal of his miserly, broken father and his mother's suicide is what really br...more

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Apr 28, 2013 Nenia Campbell rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: x-1980s, x-series-bk-1, graphic-novels, memoir, aww-he-thinks-hes-people, feels-bruised

you can read more reviews at my blog, the armchair librarian.

while reading this graphic-novel, i kept asking myself what the artist was trying to accomplish by portraying all the characters as animals - mice, pigs, cats. in the end, i came to the conclusion that it was because it is just too hard to capture the human suffering of the holocaust survivors in mere artwork. maus simplifies this tragedy, in the tradition of animal farm, to a bite-sized allegory that "normal" people can understand.

i r...more

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May 20, 2007 Alicia Beale rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I switched my major to English in my senior year, I had a lot of back classes to take, especially intro classes with freshmen and sophmores, though my last intro class was a night class with primarily older women, who worked full time jobs in Edison or the Amboys and a bushel of kids waiting at home. Basically, they were there to learn more about literature, sort of as a self-improvement class for the non-literary. The class was taught by a flame hair TA, who had the personality to match. Y...more

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Feb 08, 2009 Megan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: history lovers

Recommended to Megan by: Marie Burt

Shelves: biography, graphic-novel

This was my first foray in the world of graphic novels, and I have to say I was very impressed. "Maus" is the Pulitzer Prize winning biographical tale of a Jewish man named Vladek, who survives many hardships in Poland during World War II.

Told through a series of events and stories to his son Artie, Vladek, recounts this dark time of family separation, ghetto life, starvation, hiding, military service, POW camp, and finally his shipment to Auschwitz. Through it all, Vladek is a fighter and a su...more

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Jun 08, 2009 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: glendale-library-store, books-about-writers, 2009

I know I'm not breaking any new ground by calling Art Spiegelman's "Maus" amazing -- easily one of the best Holocaust memoirs ever published. But, as if that isn't achievement enough, "Maus" also is much more than that: a nakedly honest portrayal of the strained relationship between artist-writer Art and his elderly father Vladek, neither of whom has gotten over the loss of Anja -- Art's mother and Vladek's wife -- to suicide years before. (The four-page "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case Hist...more I know I'm not breaking any new ground by calling Art Spiegelman's "Maus" amazing -- easily one of the best Holocaust memoirs ever published. But, as if that isn't achievement enough, "Maus" also is much more than that: a nakedly honest portrayal of the strained relationship between artist-writer Art and his elderly father Vladek, neither of whom has gotten over the loss of Anja -- Art's mother and Vladek's wife -- to suicide years before. (The four-page "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History," an earlier comic strip about the suicide that Spiegelman had published years before writing "Maus," and included here as part of the story, is particularly painful to read.)

No one comes out of this book unscathed: Art, even as he uses his father's Holocaust memories as the basis for his book, is impatient with the aging Vladek and castigates him for his mistakes. Vladek treats his second wife Mala poorly, mostly because she's not Anja, and Mala fails to understand Vladek, assuming that because they're both Holocaust survivors they should treat life the same way. And that's not even to mention the Jews who sell out their fellow Jews during the Holocaust (even their own relatives, at times), and the Poles who hide Jews from the Gestapos -- as long as they're being paid.

And, amazingly, Spiegelman recounts all this without becoming judgmental. Vladek understands why, during wartime, his Polish protectors demanded payment for their help. Mala understands why Art needed to turn his mother's suicide into a comic strip, and appreciates the comic's accuracy. Even the book's final scene -- I won't give it away for those who have not yet read "Maus" -- is presented starkly and in a matter-of-fact manner, with both Vladek's recounted actions and Art's angry reaction to them being completely understandable.

I don't meant to give short shrift to the book's other fine qualities: its ability to deftly jump back and forth in time, from the present day to World War II, and among various events during the war, and its perfect marriage of cartoon images to text. "Maus" really is just about perfect. Its one failing? Leaving Vladek's Holocaust story unfinished. But no matter: that's why there's a "Maus II," which I will read next.(less)

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Feb 05, 2012 Danuta rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have a real, real problem with this book. It's a powerful piece, and tells the story of one family's experiences of the Holocaust in grim and gripping detail. it's also an amazing exploration of the relationship between a father and son. I'd love to give it 5 stars. And yet... I couldn't give a decent rating to a book that depicted black people, Muslims or gays as pigs, and I can't give a good rating to a book that depicts Poles as pigs. The book is not the history of the Polish people during...more

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Dec 23, 2007 Kirstie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people interested in historical fiction, the Holocaust, and graphic novels

Shelves: graphic-novels

Told through the format of a graphic novel is the story of the Spiegelmans and how they made it through the Holocaust. The story alternates between the present in which the son is in NYC speaking to his father about the past he escaped and the depictions of the actual horrors through his father's life story. One gets the sense of devastation that isn't surprising both in the retelling of the story and the way the experience has affected him to the present day. And, I thought it was a really crea...more Told through the format of a graphic novel is the story of the Spiegelmans and how they made it through the Holocaust. The story alternates between the present in which the son is in NYC speaking to his father about the past he escaped and the depictions of the actual horrors through his father's life story. One gets the sense of devastation that isn't surprising both in the retelling of the story and the way the experience has affected him to the present day. And, I thought it was a really creative way to tell this story. I could also tell the son and author is really working through so many issues while he's writing this. It seems he is not as close as he would like to be with his father, for example, and is also trying to work through and cope with his mother's suicide.

I think in some ways it's fantastic that the author was able to combine the graphic arts with the story in order to use both mediums to gain some release over the tragedy that affected his father. However, I'm really not too into graphic novels in general and I thought the subject matter didn't fit the medium or style of the medium. It's possible I need to change my perspective on this a little as well. I think historically the Holocaust survival story had not used this medium and so I may just feel a little uncomfortable because it has the effect of on the outset making the tone seem too light. For example, the Jewish people are mice and the nazis are cats. Even when they nazis are torturing the Jews and hanging them in public as "examples," I think it would have been more effective if he had drawn people even instead of mice. The horror just didn't sufficiently fit the drawing to me.

In any case, it's important to read this story and I am always amazed when I read about how versatile some of these survivors were able to be in terms of keeping alive by knowing so many languages and using any skill they had and being able to still hide valuables that could be traded. The flexibility and resiliency of this father and many other survivors is just immense to me. However, I think that because of the medium, the story didn't have as profound of an effect as, for example, some of Elie Wiesel's work. (less)

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May 19, 2008 Vinnie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: anyone

Shelves: grapic-novels

There's a lot of praise out there for this book, and it's all well deserved. There are countless books that tell stories of the Holocaust. None do it the way Maus does. By telling a real story through a medium that values the surreal, the author, Art Spiegelman, (who is also the artist) gives a fresh look at a dark chapter in the history of the world. Representing the characters in this story as animals could, at first, be an affront to some. It seems insensitive to de-humanize the victims of th...more

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Jul 28, 2007 Kimberly rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic-novels

Maus I is Vladek Spiegelman (Art's father's) tale of survival from the rise of the Nazi party through his imprisonment in Auschwitz in Spring, 1944. This is the story of the Nuremberg laws, the progressive isolation and desperation of the Jews, the inexcusable acts of bystanders, and the formation of ghettos throughout Poland. Maus II is the story of Auschwitz and beyond.

What I loved so much about this book was Spiegelman's visual representation of the genocide. The Jews are mice; the Germans ar...more

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Jun 17, 2007 stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-memory, historical-fiction, wwii, holocaust, graphic-novels-comics

a graphic novel of the holocaust? that features MICE? with crazy cats and dogs and pigs as the bad guys?

this is bloody brilliant. i know, i never would have believed it either, but just - it's the story of a young mouse whose father is plagued by his history as a concentration camp survivor, and he just doesn't get why his father can't get over it. (mice-jews, cats-nazis, pigs-germans, and i actually forget who the dogs are. i'm guessing the americans.)

the first volume is exquisitely crafted, a...more

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Jan 17, 2009 Christine added it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-accounts

This was difficult to get through at times- but Art Spiegelman makes a tricky attempt at relating the Holocaust to a game of cat and "maus" look easy. The entire narrative is laid out in comic strips. And while "comics" make us think "funny," the author/artist keeps the severity of the story in check.

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Oct 15, 2012 Luc Abdullah added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, english, graphic

Tentang 'mereka' yang engkau selalu maki. Tentang 'mereka' yang engkau katakan perosak dunia. Tentang 'mereka' yang engkau jadi konsumer produk-produk mereka sambil tutup kedua-dua mata.

Jangan tanya kenapa tidak letak bintang, engkau ingat aku suka guna mesin timbang?

P/s: Molek dibaca, dowh!

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Apr 04, 2012 Cassie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic-novels, historical-fiction, biography, wwii, holocaust

This is the first graphic novel I had ever read. I couldn't put it down once I started. There are so many layers that make up this book that intrigued me. Plus knowing this was a biography made it all the more sobering and interesting. It's a heartbreaking tale of surviving, history, and coping with that history that left me thinking about it long after I'd finished it.

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Nov 11, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars

Maus I is definitely a triumph of the graphic novel form, both because of the extraordinary content and the intelligent use of the graphic medium that Spiegelman wraps around that content. [return][return]By concentrating his story on a person (his father, Vladek) and not simply on the inevitable series of horrible events the reader knows is coming, Spiegelman manages to weave a narrative thread that transcends the horrors. This is not to suggest that Maus I glosses over any of the many sad part...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Martine Taylor added it

Best graphic novel I've ever read. This is a bit like Elie Wiesel's Night but in comic book format with cartoon mice. Surprisingly this works on so many levels. Story and graphics are haunting. Graphically there are some interesting choices like using mice, cats, pigs to illustrate various groups of people. The holocaust survivor telling his story to his son results in a back-and-forth narrative of the horrific events of the holocaust jucstaposed with how those horrors and huge losses effect the...more

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Jan 16, 2009 Mike rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: world-history

Though I read through this book in just an hour or two, I literally could not put it down, though I was supposed to be getting ready for work, eating breakfast, etc. My kids are learning about the history of WWII and the holocaust now, and we had picked up the second of these books at the library a few weeks ago. I ordered the first one (for years I'd heard so much about these books) and found it absolutely compelling and frightening, as so many holocaust stories are. Spiegelman's parents (drawn...more

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Dec 10, 2008 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: graphic-novels-comics, non-fiction, owned, re-read, 2008

Maus is Art Spiegelman's graphical interpretation of stories his father related about surviving the holocaust. Despite the way the stories are presented, Spiegelman doesn't pull any punches.

The majority of the text is (or seems to be) his father's words verbatim. Often Spiegelman's father Vladek, in his present-day dealings with his son and his wife, comes across as an antithesis of his former self. No longer resourceful, caring and heroic, but rather callous and self centred.

It is during thes...more

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Dec 01, 2008 Erica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: outside-reading-yal

“Maus” is a common holocaust survivor’s tale. The fact that the style is a graphic novel adds an entirely new dimension to the already provocative plot. The story is being told by a Jewish man from Poland, only it is many years in the future and is being transcribed by his son. Flashbacks comprise most of the story, but the times when the father and son are talking in present time are some of the most eloquent of scenes. Since the story goes back and forth from present day to wartime Poland, we...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Eugene S. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Maus, Vol. 1: My Father Bleeds History
by Art Spiegelman
159 pages

Artie Spiegelmen is a young man who goes to his father's house to hear about what happened to his father in about Hitler's time. Artie's family are Jews. Artie's father, Vladek Spiegelman, had a hard time trying to live. He married Anja. Vladek got caught a lot. Once he got caught in war. Vladek had to work hard for a long time. Then he was freed. But it was getting harder to escape. Lots of family members died. Vladek and Anja b...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Sophia Martin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reading-like-a-writer

Maus is a book written by Art Spiegelman. He writes his father's story about surviving the Holocaust. Spiegelman writes quoting his father's exact words. Mai's portrays a first hand account of the Holocaust. It provided information that was very knew to me, like things that went on in concentration camps. Spiegelman also uses pigs, cats, and mice to portray characters instead of people. Maus is also written in the form of a comic book which makes children want to read it, but it should be reserv...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Katie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's real, gritty, emotional, raw, and touching. And it's a COMIC BOOK?

I know. I didn't believe it either. A friend of mine recommended this book to me months ago and I finally got around to starting it (and finishing it an hour and half later) today. I wish I wouldn't have waited.

Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel (note: NOT comic book, these are very different things, *ahem*) based on his father's life during the years leading up to and at the very beginning of WW2. His dad, Jewish living i...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Terry Hansen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, must-buys

Read Read Read Read this book. It was nothing what i expected. I was expecting a story told about Jews survivng the holocaust portrayed as mice and the Nazis as Cats. Which this book is, in a way, but it is a memoir of a man and his father. Art is interviewing is father about the Holocaust so he can write the very book you read. To see the interplay between father and Son and their realtionship. To see the lingering psychological effects the Haolocaust had on Art's Father is fascinating. Even th...more

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Apr 13, 2013 John Alt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In Maus (Mice), jews are mice, the Germans, cats. It is a cat and mouse game, with the Gestapo hunting the Jews, and the Jews hiding from them, once again being found and once again running for a new shelter. The Poles are pigs, and there are a few good pigs among them, helping the mice hide from the cats. The use of animals becomes an ironic depiction of Hitler's statement that the Jews are a race, but they are not human, which Spiegelman inserts at the start of the book.

This all sounds cartoon...more In Maus (Mice), jews are mice, the Germans, cats. It is a cat and mouse game, with the Gestapo hunting the Jews, and the Jews hiding from them, once again being found and once again running for a new shelter. The Poles are pigs, and there are a few good pigs among them, helping the mice hide from the cats. The use of animals becomes an ironic depiction of Hitler's statement that the Jews are a race, but they are not human, which Spiegelman inserts at the start of the book.

This all sounds cartoonish because it is but there is nothing funny about it. Inspired by Frans Masereel's 1919 wordless novel, Passionate Journey, Spiegelman's is also a graphic novel but, unlike Passionate Journey, his is of caricatures and he uses words. It helped set a new genre, and also became a mixture of genres and themes, biography, autobiography, history, psychology, and dysfunctional family.

Vladek, Spiegelman's father, survived Auschwitz to prosper and live in pricey Rego Park, Queens, with Anja, Vladek's wife, who slashed her wrists there, long after the Holocaust. This happened after Art left a mental hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown.

With the cat and mouse game of Germans and Jews it is a novel of survival and terror, of scars passed from father to son. Hoarding every barter-worthy scrap to exchange for food, Vladek lets go of nothing, even finding wire on a Queens sidewalk which, as he explains to the embarrassed Art, might be handy some day. On his part, Art learns that as more Jews were found hiding in coal cellars and attics, his older brother was poisoned by his aunt--along with herself and her children--the only way to escape the gas chambers. This helps explain scars. Art was raised with an overbearing father who did not allow the son to learn a separate competence. The reader senses that a clinging Anja as well as others depended on Vladek for survival during the cat and mouse game and the need to be strong remained indelible as what Vladek learned about life. The scars he bore from suffering as a maus became new kinds of scars for the son.(less)

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Mar 22, 2013 Shaun rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: eng356-2nd-half

Maus is a graphic novel that follows a son who tries to connect with his father by learning more about his history as a Jew during the Holocaust. Through interviews, the father's story unfolds and shows a tragic history of survival and betrayal. The father now is a bitter old man that is unhappy with marriage and his life. However, we learn that he used to be full of life and love and was willing to do whatever he needed to do to protect those around him. Constantly running and being persecuted...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Jenna Scurto rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: info-bios

Maus: My Father Bleed History by Art Spiegleman tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father. Vladek experiences love, his first child, and struggles with the rise of the Nazi party. The graphic novel was met with controversy and a backlash when readers found out Spiegelman was depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazi’s as cats; a metaphor that many considered distasteful. Once, readers got past the representation, they soon realized the complexity and authenticity of the text. The text was...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Morgan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: for-my-children-11-19

This is a graphic novel written and illustrated by the son of a Holocaust survivor. It's the first of it's kind, really, and marketed to young adults because book sellers didn't know what to do with it. It follows the father and the mother during their time in concentration camps. We all know the basic horrors of the camps, and this account deals with them all. It flashes between past and present, between the camp and the father telling everything to his son.

This is a great graphic novel. I app...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Talyn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: graphic novel fans

Shelves: comics-and-drawings, wwii-and-holocaust, nonfiction, not-what-i-expected, violence, survival, me-vs-them, fighting-against-all-odds, think-of-the-kids, adults-are-monsters, absolutely-no-mercy, favorite-character, fighting-their-own-kind, anthropomorphism

This book was awesome, though the mice scared me. I enjoyed the characters, especially Artie, but his dad Vlanek was an old coot, sometimes infuriating. Poor Mala..

The drawings were awesome, yet kind of creepy, but I got easily confused with all of the names. Seriously, I needed a family tree or something, not that that ever helps me.

Even though WWII and the Holocaust has been DONE so many times, thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times, this was still fresh and unique in its story te...more This book was awesome, though the mice scared me. I enjoyed the characters, especially Artie, but his dad Vlanek was an old coot, sometimes infuriating. Poor Mala..

The drawings were awesome, yet kind of creepy, but I got easily confused with all of the names. Seriously, I needed a family tree or something, not that that ever helps me.

Even though WWII and the Holocaust has been DONE so many times, thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times, this was still fresh and unique in its story telling, the people, and the points of view. Still haunts me how people could do this to others.

And while I'm on the subject, there seems to be an ongoing discrimination an prejudiced opinion floating around the internet and everyday life that EVERYONE seems to respect as fact and "normal":

Persecution of Middle Eastern- descended people and Muslims.

(view spoiler)

So read this book, because 1) It's a graphic novel, and 2) It's unique despite being about the age-old Holocaust and WWII.

This reminds me of Apocalypse Meow/Cat Shit One, since it's about war and nationalities are represented by animals. Pretty cool and creative, if you ask me.(less)

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Jan 25, 2013 Shannon rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, historical-fiction, would-not-recommend

I had to read this book for school. I guess the main reason I didn't like this book was because it was a "graphic novel" (aka comic book). I usually love reading books about World War II, but this book just bored me. Nothing exciting ever happened in the book. Also, the characters annoyed me. The main character is always yelling at his wife for "spending too much money" while she yells are him for "spending too little money." I had to agree with his wife. The main character takes paper towels fr...more

1 like · like · see review

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What do you think motivated the author, Art Spiegelman to write a comic book about his father's past?	13	116	Mar 23, 2013 12:01pm
Wild Things: YA G...: AUGUST: Maus I A Survivor's Tale My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman	32	180	Sep 30, 2010 09:30pm

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About Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman (born February 15, 1948) is an American comics artist, editor, and advocate for the medium of comics, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic memoir, Maus. The second volume of Maus was dedicated to Richieu and to Spiegelman's daughter Nadja. He also has a son, currently a junior at Brown University.

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Books by Art Spiegelman

Maus, Vol. 2: And Here My Troubles Began

MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

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Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (Maus #1)

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