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Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Art Spiegelman
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"I chose to read Maus 1 and Maus 2 by Art Spiegelman. The first reason would be is I'm kind of an aficionado of World War II books. After I saw Saving Private Ryan, I just started picking up all the books I could about World War II. So I've read almost every Steven Ambrose book, I've read a lot of Holocaust literature. As a teacher, we'd adopted these books five years before I started teaching; and so I read them as part of preparing for our freshmen curriculum.
It's one of the books where, when you pick it up, you don't put it down. You want to find out what happens. It's a graphic novel, so basically it's a comic book. Of course, it's not funny. So it makes it much easier to read.
Maus 1: A Survivor's Tale is basically the story of a guy named Vladek Spiegelman, and it's from the point of view of his son. His son is a famous cartoonist named Art Spiegelman, who has done New Yorker covers and other types of comics in the past. Art Spiegelman has grown up his life kind of living in -- living with a Holocaust survivor as a father.
It's done through a series of flashbacks where we will have Art and Vladek. Vladek will be telling Art the story of what happened to him back in Poland, and Art will then go and draw it, and then we'll flash back while Vladek tells us his stories of the coming to power, the Nazis and the invasion of Poland.
The genius of the books is that Art Spiegelman has made the Holocaust accessible to us. He's able to show us images of the Holocaust in an accessible way. If we were to view the pictures in real life that he draws, we would put the book down in ten minutes because we emotionally can't handle that much. But because he puts it in the metaphor of a cartoon, even as strange as that may seem, it makes it more accessible and we can read the story as a whole and be able to handle it and then digest it.
It's one of the only times where I teach a book and I don't assign pages. I say, "Just take this book home, just start reading it right now in class; and then take it home tonight and we'll see what happens." Half the students go home that night, finish reading the book, they come back the next day and they ask for Maus 2. They go home and they take Maus 2 home the next night, and the read it in basically in two subsequent nights. There's no other book that I teach -- or books -- that do that.
These books, Maus 1 and Maus 2, are both five stars. I can't think of any book that I would recommend higher."
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