Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art SpiegelmanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
"My Father Bleeds History" is the first of two volumes of the (in)famous MAUS graphic novel, and tells the rise and fall of the Spiegelman family fortunes in Nazi-occupied Poland from the 1930's until 1944.
I've been wanting to read this ever since a school board in the U.S. banned the books, which of course made sales skyrocket. It took this reader more than 11 months to FINALLY track down the books because they were sold out everywhere, even from international sources!!
You know how some terribly violent movies suddenly switch from full color to black and white, when things are about to get especially gory?
Art Spiegelman's art is like that. Make no mistake: this is not an innocent children's book one gives to the very young because "they're comics with cute mice and cats."
This is brutal history, redrawn primarily I think as a way to make it more palatable, otherwise one would simply put it down from sheer horror.
This is the true story of one family's fight for survival, with Jews drawn as mice and Nazis as cats, but it only marginally distracts from the reality drawn in. At some points, the tragedy was nearly overwhelming, I was downright GRATEFUL for the conceit of animals drawn in, instead of humans.
I'm only halfway done, with second volume in hand, so I shall be continuing the review as these two really ought to be read together. But already, I can't wait to see how the story plays out.
No matter the horror, this book SHOULD be kept in libraries and discussed in schools. We do our children a disservice by shielding them utterly from all evil, to the point that, when they inevitably encounter it in real life, they are unequipped to deal with it.
But perhaps MAUS should be introduced at the appropriate age level. I think this should be kept for the eyes of high school students only, and definitely with both parents and teachers processing the text afterwards.
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