Reviews tagging 'Animal cruelty'

Maus: A Survivor's Tale. My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman

1 review

cstein's review

challenging dark emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective sad fast-paced

4.25

Spiegelman's decision to draw rather than merely write this memoir importantly limits the reader's imagination, leaving drastically less room for confusion, wrong interpretation, or willful ignorance of the facts of his and his father's experiences. In a similarly ingenious way, Spiegelman's cartoon animal characters provide sufficient whimsy and distance from the horrors of the Holocaust to make the work readable, while also prompting frequent pauses to reflect on how the emotions and horrors experienced by these cartoon animals are actually those experienced by very much non-cartoon people. Phew.

As the Newsweek review of this work reads, in part, "Maus compels us to bear witness in a different way: the very artificiality of its surface makes it possible to imagine the reality beneath." 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Antisemitism, Death, Confinement, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Suicide, Child death, and Murder

Moderate: Violence, Blood, Chronic illness, Deportation, Genocide, Cursing, Forced institutionalization, Gore, Grief, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, and Physical abuse

Minor: Racial slurs, Racism, War, Vomit, and Excrement