Book Bearings
Maus I
- 295 pages · about 5 hours
- First published 1986
- 66 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Maus is Art Spiegelman's graphic memoir of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. In the late 1970s Art visits his aging father in Queens, New York, and records his memories; the book moves between those visits, with their quarrels and silences, and the story Vladek tells. This first volume begins in the mid-1930s and follows Vladek and his wife, Anja, through the German occupation of Poland as far as Auschwitz. Spiegelman draws Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. A second volume completes the account.
- History
- Comics & graphic novels, biography & memoir
- Biography
- Medicine
- History, 20th Century
- Autobiography
- Graphic novels
- Holocaust survivors
2 What to expect
A graphic memoir in black and white: a cartoonist interviews his father, a Polish Jew, about surviving the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as mice and Germans as cats. Two stories run side by side, the father's years of persecution and hiding, and the strained present-day relationship between a difficult old man and his son. It is direct, unsentimental and quick to read but hard to take, and this first volume stops at the gates of Auschwitz.
Good for readers who want: a graphic memoir, Holocaust history through one family, and a father-and-son story.
3 About Art Spiegelman
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 Similar books
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Peter Kropotkin
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- An Autobiography by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
- Persepolis 1-4 by Marjane Satrapi
- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird