The power of Maus doesn’t require such exhaustive explanation and annotation, but those with a taste for it will find their...
Everything you ever wanted to know about the creation, impact and aftereffects of Maus.
The cultural significance of the Pulitzer Prize–winning work by Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers, 2004) is beyond dispute. Not only did it establish the critical respectability and mainstream market for what have come to be called “graphic novels,” but its unsentimental account of family tragedy and dynamics showed a way that art could deal with death-camp genocide without descending into what the author terms “Holokitsch.” On the 25th anniversary of the publication of Maus I, this volume serves as the publishing industry’s version what the music industry markets as a box set—with extended bonus material, contextual analyses and previously unreleased cuts (some 7,500 drawings and sketches are but a small fraction of the offerings on the accompanying DVD). Included within the book are an exhaustive interview with the author by English professor Hillary Chute, shorter (but not short) interviews with his wife and their offspring on the artist and his art, plenty of illustrations from sketchbooks and inspirations, family photos, family trees, rejection letters (from major publishers), the source-material transcript of the author’s discussions with his father about the latter’s experiences in Auschwitz and Dachau and the original three-page version of “Maus” from 1972 that spawned the two-volume masterpiece. For Spiegelman, the key questions to address (at length) provide chapter titles: “Why the Holocaust?”; “Why Mice?”; “Why Comics?” The answers are intermittently fascinating and often provocative, though only an obsessive or an academic is likely to need a two-page response to the question: “You kept lots of pictures of mice and other animals around while you were working. Which ones were especially significant?” Yet the accompanying DVD will satisfy the insatiable appetite, with “a digital reference copy of The Complete Maus” (with audio and visual links) plus “MetaMeta” supplements that make the printed volume seem like an appetizer.
The power of Maus doesn’t require such exhaustive explanation and annotation, but those with a taste for it will find their appreciation enhanced.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-42394-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
