Rating: 
Summary: OUTSTANDING!!!
Review: I thought this book was outstanding. As a teen, it gave me a very clear understanding of the Holocaust by using so many types of symbolism, and I learned a-lot about the war while reading it. One part of the symbolism that I really liked was the fact that the Jews were mice, and the Germans were cats who all they wanted to do was to kill the mice. The only part that I had a problem with, was that he made the Polish people pigs. Even though that is not politically correct, it didn't ruin the book. After reading the book, I was sad that it was over because it read so fast. This is definitely one of those books that you have trouble putting down. Although I have to admit, some parts got a little boring because of all of the descriptiveness, it did not cut into my love of this book. I believe that everyone should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Very good, very touching, very worthwhile.
Review: I will admit I had to read this for a class I was taking about modern Jewish history. But I also chose to take said class and was very curious about the subject matter. Maus was the third and last biographical work that we read in class (Solomon Maimon's and Pauline Wengeroff's autobiographies being the others) and it was easily the most unique.When I told friends that I was reading a comic book about the Holocaust I received many strange looks. But there was always one response that made people understand: The author's father survived the Holocaust and he wanted to tell his father's story in the medium he knew best. Art Spiegelman puts unsurpassed passion into this work that ties his father and mother's struggles in wartime Poland as well as his own struggles with his geriatric father thirty years later. Told with a serious tone overlaid with characters where Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, Germans are cats, and the other nationalities are equally represented in animal form, Maus proved to be an extremely unique and endlessly fascinating and tragic biography. I have never been one for reading comic books, but Art Spiegelman's effort can do nothing less than elevate the respect anyone could have for the art form.
Rating:
Summary: Simply Brilliant II
Review: In the two volumes of "Maus," Art Spiegelman has captured the essence of the Holocaust. He focuses his tale on his own family's tragic history, using the strangely-appropriate medium of comic book drawing. Maus II tells the Spiegelman family story from confinement in Auschwitz to the harrowing days at the end of the war through liberation and establishment in America.
Art is a tortured son of a tortured family. Mother and father lived through the Holocaust on their wits and good luck. Now that the war is over, they continue to live haunted lives, never free of the fear and mass murder that enveloped their youth. Art, their American artist child, just barely tolerates his father's obsessiveness and extreme miserliness. The father, while starving in Auschwitz, saved half of his morning rations for trading for shoes or clothes. Now that he is old, he continues to play every nook and cranny of the system in order to save a wooden match or to cadge a free bingo game. The sense of the man's weirdness (and his son's resulting lack of patience) is palpably sad and funny at the same time.
Spiegelman's art is deceptively innocuous, using a black and white comic book style. His tale alternates between the present story of his elderly, pill-counting father in the present and the past story of ghettos, cruelty and death camps. Spiegelman draws his humans with animals heads -- an ingenious way to portray ethnic and cultural differences that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. Jews are rendered as mouse-headed humans, Poles with pig heads and Nazis topped with heads of predacious cats.
Spiegelman's tale is part history, part expiation of guilt for resenting a brother killed during the war and part rage at a family member's suicide. The war never ended for those who endured it, and ripples through time to damage the next generations. That's pretty heavy for a comic book, but Art Spiegelman pulls it off brilliantly.
Rating:
Summary: A great book with scary information.
Review: It can be very difficult for a book to truly tell the full story of the terror and strife that people had to go through during the holocaust. Art Spiegelman does a great job of telling this story in a way not widely used. His book Maus is a graphic novel of his father's holocaust story. The subject not only is the holocaust but also the psychological damage it caused many of those who lived through it.
Maus tells a story of the holocaust from one who lived through it. He is telling his son his many different experiences and how he was able to live through it. Also it gives very interesting information on how his father's life was changed forever because of what happened to him. Among many things his father cannot throw food away and hates spending money on things that you do not desperately need. Great detail is in the experiences from the holocaust and much of it is quite frightening that any person would ever have to go through something like that.
There are many different problems and challenges that Vladek, Art's father, had to face during his lifetime. One of the most difficult would of course be his holocaust experience. Being taken from his home and shipped to Auschwitz where he and his wife were separated into two separate camps and not allowed to see each other. It was his ability to communicate with the guards and also in ingenuity that really made him strong enough to survive.
When he was still in the "Quarantine Block" he befriended on of the polish leaders of the barracks. By teaching him English he was able to miss any of the firing squads that were there to help take down the numbers of Jewish that were in the camp. The Polish guard or "Kapo" also gave him food and clothing for his help.
Vladek's struggles stayed with him his entire life though. Even when he was very old and telling his son Art about his experiences he was in very poor health and was very lonely after his first wife committed suicide and his second left him. He found living very difficult and many people thought he was quite crazy with his many eccentricities. After his wife left she had left some cereal he could not eat so he took the half-eaten box to the grocery store and asked for some money back for it because he could not stand to waste any food after going for such a long time without any.
I thought that Maus was a very good book and was very well written. It was a completely different book than I am used to reading and it suited me quite well. The story is very sad but throughout it the characters make many changes as they all try to work together to help resolve Vladek's holocaust experience and the after math of it. Reading a graphic novel lends a lot to a book because it really allows the author to show the picture of exactly what he wants you to feel about the situation. It really focuses your attention on the things that are of great importance that may be overlooked in a regular book. I feel that anyone that would really like to get a good idea of what people had to go through during the holocaust should really read this book and they are sure to not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Spiegelman is king
Review: Landmark work rightfully crowned with a Pulitzer. Essential component of any self-respecting collection of illustrated strips.
Rating: 
Summary: Compelling Story - Read it
Review: Like Maus I this book can be read in an hour or so. Vladek's story of survival at Auschwitz is incredible. As a baby boomer I didn't live during this era. Having descended from Germans I have studied this period and have wondered how this could have happened. I'm not going to pretend to really understand what happened and what it was like. I have read other personal accounts of the holocaust but due, I guess, to the comic book format I found this much more accessible. We all should understand as much as we can about this horrific period of history. With just a small investment of time Maus I and II will provide to you a dramatic survivor's experience. We should never forget that this actually happened.
Rating:
Summary: Maus
Review: Maus
Spiegelman
T. Chung
Period 6 Artie Spiegelman is writing about his father, Vladek Spiegelman, of how he survived in World War 2. Vladek's story start when he meets his wife Anja. She is rich and very lovable woman with a pure soul. They live happily with each other; however, when the Germans starts attacking, their peace ends. Vladek and Anja hides in bunkers, and Vladek's intellegence ables them to survive the war. When the war is finally over, Vladek and Anja couldn't live happily with all the experiences, and the death of their family and son.
One of the part I liked was when Mala shows the comic strip made by Artie long time ago, about Anja's suicide. It shows how painful it was when his mother died, and how his father has fallen apart. Artie also says that "[his] release from the state mental hospital "(102), showing that he had many problems too. It was some way weird too, when Vladek started to recite The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I also liked the part where Anja and Vladek got together again. Anja tells a story that she went to a gypsy to know her future for atleast a little hope. When she went to the gypsy, she was told that "[Vladek]'s coming home! [Anja]'ll get a sign that he's alive by the time the moon is full"(293). Anja waits until the day of the full moon, and a sign really came! Vladek sent a picture of himself and a letter. This was a happy ending, kind of like a fairy tale, and I liked it.
My favorite part of the book is how Artie told a long, touching story into a comic book. It would have took him a very long time to write this, and it would have been hard for him to write such personal things in a book, where everything goes into public. The story was definitely believable, and I enjoyed it very much.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful! Moving! A Comic! (..sorry...graphic novel)
Review: Mice don't seem to make the subject any easier or more difficult to grasp, but it allows you to digest it easier. Ooohh...those are PEOPLE!
Rating: 
Summary: foolish book
Review: Mouse ? After reading I was about to think that german nazi concentration camps built on Poland teritories to exterminate Poles and polish Jews was founded by polish people or polish Jews. Completly confused book. But I have read the other book about this field worth advertising:
Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation 1939-1944 by Richard C. Lukas, Norman Davies (Paperback - July 2001)
Rating:
Summary: How do you talk about the Holocaust
Review: Spiegelman skillfully uses the comic-book style to examine one of the most difficult subjects of the last century.
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