Morning Coffee Book Club

Read on the Edge with the new  Morning Coffee Book Club.  Join us for a discussion of The Complete Maus (Maus I & II) by Art Spiegelman at 10:00 a.m. in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library.

The WMML Book Club meets on the third Wednesday of the month at 10:00 a.m. at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library and is open to everyone. Members of the club read the selected book for the month, then join in lively discussions. Please click here to see a list of future selections for the WMML Book Club.

Refreshments are generously provided by Aspen Mills Bakery. Thank you, Aspen Mills!

May 17, 2017

The Complete Maus (Maus I & II) by Art Spiegelman 

—Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker).

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father’s story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in “drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust” (The New York Times).

Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek’s harrowing story of survival is woven into the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century’s grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. Maus studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.