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Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman: Book Review

This is the continuation of the true story of Vladek Spiegelman's survival as a Jew in WWII Poland. Most of what I wrote in my review of Maus I still stands, but there’s a bit more of the author’s feelings included. You can see the catharsis he’s going through as he writes this novel. He’s painfully honest about the conflicting feelings he has toward his father and his mother. Again, most of Vladek’s survival relied on luck, but I was left in awe of his ingenuity and his talent for survival. But the man would drive me crazy. I was left wondering if he was the way he was because of what he went through or if he was just born that way. This book touches on prejudices we still have today, even people who should know better. I have to admit that I was welling up before I had read one word of the story--and I'm not a crier. Maus I and Maus II are just such powerful books. Still highly, highly recommended. Reviewed August 14, 2009 Read an excerpt. Buy Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began at Malaprop’s | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with Malaprop's, my local independent bookstore, and Better World Books. I will receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase books through links on my site.

Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman: Book Review

Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, was a Jew living in Poland in WWII. He made it through, and Maus I is Spiegelman’s story of his father’s life, as well as an exploration of the way the lives of the survivors and their family members were never the same. Okay, let’s look at the fact that this is a graphic novel first. It absolutely works. The Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, the French are frogs--you get the idea. This is a young adult book, so I think that helps kids/teens deal with the story a little better. A skeletal mouse is alarming enough, but it would be so much harder for a child to deal with if it had been a photo of a skeletal person. As an adult who knows something about what happened, I found that the form made me see with new eyes. We’ve all seen “Schindler’s List” or read one of the books written by survivors. But this form somehow hit me a little harder, almost as if I were learning about the Holocaust for the first time. It still stays true to the horror and atrocity. Some of it is sort of passed over, but the moments when the violence is shown stand out that much more. I’ve read quite a few Holocaust novels, but the moments of random violence in Maus I hit me hard. Spiegelman took the “less is more” approach and it worked. There were so many things I liked about this book. The historical part of the story opens with Vladek as a reasonably prosperous young mouse marrying into a wealthy family. I liked that this is where it started. I got to see how everything was slowly stripped away until they were desperate for any shelter and any food. That…

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi: Book Review

Primo Levi was a young Jewish man living in Turin, Italy when he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Due to a combination of luck and calculation, he survived. I truly, truly hate to give any Holocaust memoir less than five stars. They are all important and they should all be read. That said. Somehow I never got drawn into this book. It took me two weeks to read a book that is 190 pages long. Crazy, right? I can't put my finger on what my problem was. Bear with me as I try to work it out. Maybe it's that I'm more of the "feeling" personality type and Levi seems to be more of a "thinker." He does have some very astute observations to make about humanity. I started to lose interest in a chapter titled "The Drowned and the Saved." This chapter was almost like a primer for how to survive in such horrific conditions. I have concluded that I wouldn't make it. I don't understand anything that resembles economics. So descriptions of schemes to trade 1 piece of bread for a coupon that somehow turns into 4 pieces of bread left me scratching my head. I don't get it. My eyes glazed over. I did finally get more interested in the very last chapter, "The Story of Ten Days." This felt more personal to me. Levi and some fellow prisoners are trying to survive in the abandoned camp until the Russian army arrives. They immediately lose the "survival at all costs" mentality and start to look out for each other again. In looking back through this book for my review, I see a lot of passages that seem pertinent and that provide a lot of food for thought. Maybe this was just a bad time for me…

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman: Book Review

Jan and Antonina Żabiński were the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo when Germany invaded Poland. Between the bombing, Nazi cruelty, and the Nazi desire to keep all of the rare animals for themselves, there quickly wasn't much of a zoo to keep. But Jan was an ingenious thinker and he came up with various ideas to keep the zoo complex under his care. From community gardens to a pig farm to a fur farm, he always had the zoo under his control. He was deeply involved in the Polish Underground, and as part of his efforts, he moved hundreds of Jews through his zoo on the way to safer ground. This wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and that was both good and bad. Generally coming at WWII through the Holocaust, I mainly think of Poland as the home of Auschwitz and the worst of the concentration camps. That's as far as I take it. I've never given any thought to the fact that Germany invaded Poland first and kept the Poles brutally repressed throughout the duration. Diane Ackerman showed me how bad it was for the Poles. My problem was that I expected more of a narrative about life in the zoo, but the story was all over the place. There was actually very little about the zoo and the Jews in hiding there. A few who stayed for a while were written about, but that was about it. The rest of it bounced around a lot. There was a constant thread about the Żabiński family and how they made it through the war. But then there would be paragraphs about girl couriers helping the Underground, a pediatrician who refused to escape because he didn't want to leave the children in his orphanage, random people in the Underground and…

At Home by Bill Bryson: Book Review

We take so much in our daily lives for granted. Bill Bryson looked around his house one day, realized how little he knew about the everyday objects surrounding him, and, being Bill Bryson, decided to research and write a book about them. I read this slowly as my before-bed book, and I'm not sure that was always a good idea. Reading about how ingenious rats are as I hear the pitter-pat of little rodent feet in my attic space is not necessarily a good idea. But at least now I know who invented the traps my husband set out! This book is hard to describe. It's roughly arranged by room, but my gosh, it travels around on some tangents. I'm not complaining. It all flowed together naturally and I only questioned how I had gotten to one subject if I really stopped to think about a particular chapter title. "The nursery" goes from childbirth to child labor to poor house conditions to the repression of wealthy children to conditions at boarding schools. But I promise you it all flows together, and it's all interesting in the way that only Bill Bryson can pull off. I am not a huge fan of non-fiction, so I don't know that I could really have enjoyed this as much if I had read it straight through with no breaks, but as an in-between book, I really enjoyed it. I'm now full of trivia about all kinds of things that could even remotely be considered to have anything to do with private life. They always say that truth is stranger than fiction. Bryson proves it. I read some of the more outrageous tidbits to my husband, who pretty much refuses to believe that they're true. But I don't question Bryson's research, so I believe him…

The Classics by Caroline Taggart: Book Review

Do you ever find yourself reading along, and when you come to a reference to ancient Greece or Rome, you start scratching your head? With sort of a, "I think I heard something about that somewhere, but I don't remember much about it" kind of thought? The Classics: All You Need to Know, from Zeus's Throne to the Fall of Rome is the book for you. Caroline Taggart has put together a short (169 pages) primer/refresher for all that ancient stuff that you used to know but that has fallen by the wayside. Or maybe you never learned it in the first place. For such a short book, Taggart has packed a surprising amount of information into it. Topics covered include language, mythology, philosophy, history, the arts, the sciences, and a few more things. You won't read the book and be an expert by any means, but you will certainly have a decent base of knowledge to work from. The book might sound boring, but Taggart's style is actually pretty fun. "Atlas was inhospitable to Perseus (see page 47), who used the head of Medusa to turn him into a mountain range in North Africa, which takes almost as much talent as cutting someone's head off while looking at their reflection in a shield, and makes me think that Perseus could have taught David Copperfield a thing or two." She also occasionally mentions modern-day references to these ancient stories. "The first famous figure to emerge from this was Draco, who has given his name to very harsh measures in any context, as well as to a character in Harry Potter who provokes the audience to hiss whenever he appears." It's very good for what it is, but after suffering through a 10th-grade English teacher who seemed to think that World…

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson: Book Review

Bill Bryson is back and this time's he's tackling the question of "Where do we come from?" in a very accessible kind of way. He gives an everyman's scientific explanation of the creation of the universe, the world, the atmosphere, evolution, human evolution, you name it. Pretty much all the sciences are covered, from astronomy to physics to geology to biology and plenty more that I can't think of at the moment. I'm not really a non-fiction person. I'm just not. But Bill Bryson usually keeps me entertained with his witty writing style. He didn't really manage to be witty while writing about science, but he was interesting. Probably some of my favorite parts were back stories about how odd some of the most famous scientists were (Did you know that Sir Isaac Newton, probably one of the most brilliant scientists that has ever or will ever live, decided to shove a big needle into the back of his eye one time, just to see what would happen?). I also got my biology degree once upon a time, so he did get around to covering stuff that does obviously interest me. There was absolutely no mention of creationism in this book, so I wouldn't recommend it to people who would be offended by that. He did get a little environmentally preachy right at the very end, but that didn't bother me. If you're interested in how things work--or, sometimes, just how scientists think things might work--this book is for you.