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: Powerful, Engaging, Amazing
Review: I am not a big fan of comic books. I only picked up Spiegelman's Maus because it was recommended to me by a friend. Never have I been so happy to follow someone's advice. Maus is one of the most powerful and engaging war tale I've read thus far. It's very touching and emotional. A young men is interviewing his father in order to make a comic book out of his experience of being a Jew during the 2nd World War. We hear the father's story as he recalls how he hid with his wife during the war, how his wife's family was murdered, how his son was taken from him and then killed, how he was brought to a concentration camp and seperated from his wife to live in fear and misery. The drawings are crude and simple. The jews are portrayed as being mice and the Germans are pigs. But the power behind the tale is the story itself. It is so touching that you cannot help but care for the story's characters. I never thought a comic book could be so engaging and so emotionally striking. This is one book that I'll come back to time and time again.
Rating:
Summary: Maus is the most powerful comic I have ever read.
Review: The story starts with how the main charecter and his wife met and follows how they survived WWII. The story is told thru a father to his son. The son is the man who wrote the book. This makes it a combination Biography and historical drama. What makes it more powerful is the fact that the story is true.
Rating:
Summary: Quietly moving...deeply stirring
Review: What can be said about this book that hasn't already? Through the lens of one man's story, we get to know World War II and the holocaust from the inside - not just the events and the feelings, but a very real sense of how this period shaped those who lived through it - and their children. Raw, honest, gripping - and often difficult to read - but justly deserving the accolades that it has received. A modern classic, told in tiny, black-and-white drawings. ** NOTE: This is an honest book about the holocaust, and all that this implies. There are many gruesome and horrifying scenes that may disturb some readers, and SHOULD disturb all readers. Read it anyway. **
Rating:
Summary: Great read!
Review: I was required to read both volumes of this great biography/ comic book for summer reading, and I just loved it. This book tells of Vladek Spiegelman, father of the author/illustrator, and his trials and tribulations as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. The quick-paced, easily read Maus I & II: A Survivor's Tale really brings out the emotion involved with the families and friends of the Jews in the Holocaust. This book portrays Jews as mice (hence the name Maus), the Nazis as cats, and the Poles as pigs. Art Spiegelman also includes the switch from Nazi Germany to the present-day setting, involving the interview with his father. I truly and deeply recommend this book for the World War II interested. I also recommend it to any teachers who want to give something easy to their students. ;)
Rating: 
Summary: Neither Sensitive to Others nor Particularly Accurate
Review: Owing to the fact that Spiegelman's work is used in the classroom, it should follow the highest standards of fairness and accuracy towards the events and peoples it depicts. Unfortunately, it does neither. Animals are used to depict different peoples, and one does not have to believe in PC to notice what is going on. Cats and mice rarely carry negative connotations. Even a small child knows that pigs are a very derogatory epithet, yet Spiegelman has chosen to apply them to Poles. Why not at least let the Poles be cows? Spiegelman also depicts the pigs (Poles) being well-fed servants of the Germans. This is not the way it was at all. The kapos in Auschwitz were seldom if if ever Poles, and were usually German common criminals. The Polish inmates of Auschwitz were subject to starvation no less so than the Jewish inmates. Let us hope that Spiegelman comes out with a new edition of his work that rectifies these matters.
Rating:
Summary: Ignore the ramblings of the PC watchdog reviewers.
Review: First of all, if you've read or are reading the other reviews, 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: Another plane of comicbooks
Review: This is not a book I'd recommend to people who have little time on their hands already, because once you started it you keep on wanting to know what happens next. Before you know it you've been reading a lot of time away. But enough with the PR-talk, to the book now. It's the true story of the father of the writer, a survivor of the holocaust. The story is not told through constant war-scenes from beginning to end, but instead the conversations in which his father tells the writer the events that happened are also pencilled down. So you get a drawn conversation between father and son about that time mixed with scenes of the war AND mixed with scenes of what is going on in the CURRENT life of father and son, so many years after the war. This is really interesting because you not only get to see what happens during the war, which you can read in most history books as well, but you'll also get a glimpse of what the war has done with the whole character of it's victims. The story is brought metaforically (with the nazi's as cats and the jews as mice) so you can enjoy the story thoroughly without having the feeling your just reading another history book. It's all true but it makes you able to take some distance as well. I think everyone who looks for something more in comicbooks than just superheroes and fiction will have a great time reading with this. And when you're finished you'll find yourself longing to buy Book II probably. I know I do.
Rating: 
Summary: Comic Alternative: What if the Jews Were the Pigs?
Review: I object to the portrayal of Poles as pigs in this cartoon. It is demeaning and insulting. How would the Jewish author, and Jewish readers, feel if the genocide of Jews during the Holocaust was shown, in a popular comic strip, as Jewish pigs being sent to a giant slaughterhouse? The answer is rather obvious. So why did the author choose pigs to depict Poles? Did he lack the social intelligence of the average 5-year old, or does he harbor malevolence towards Poles? Oh, I apologize for my silly sentiments, because I forgot the obvious answer: The Poles are not deemed a politically-correct victim group, by the liberal elites, so it is perfectly OK to ridicule and demean them, even in widely-used educational material. After all, everyone in the US is equal, but some are more equal than others.
Rating:
Summary: Witty, but Bigoted and Inaccurate
Review: This comic uses animals to represent different ethic groups: The cats are the Germans, and the Jews are mice. So far, so good. Neither cats nor mice carry any strong pejorative implications. Then come the Poles--represented by pigs. This is open bigotry which would not be tolerated by any other nationality. But the Poles are neither politically, economically, nor militarily powerful, and so evidently it is OK to smear them. And so this comic does in its plot in yet another way: The Polish pigs are depicted as Kapos--those concentration camp prisoners whose role it was to serve the German masters by torturing the other inmates. But even this is historically inaccurate: Seldom if ever were Poles kapos. The actual kapos, at least in Auschwitz, were largely if not entirely German common criminals, German Communists, German socialists, etc. It was these German kapos who brutalized the captive Polish priests, Polish underground leaders, and then the Jewish inmates of Auschwitz. Are the inaccuracies and virulent anti-Polish slant of this popular comic accidental, or are they agenda-driven?
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