Posted on 01/30/2022 4:39:46 PM PST by Impala64ssa
Titles from Maus – a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about the Holocaust – made up nearly half of Amazon’s 10 best-selling comics and graphic novels Friday after one of the books was controversially banned by a Tennessee school district.
was released, a collection of the complete Maus titles is the top-selling graphic novel on Amazon, and it’s ranked 16th on the platform’s list of best-selling books from all genres.
Maus I, a Maus I and Maus II paperback box set and Maus II are also all in the top 10 of Amazon’s graphic novel best sellers.
The surge in sales followed a vote by a school board in Tennessee to ban Maus in its eighth-grade classrooms over what they claimed was the novel’s “unnecessary use of profanity and nudity” and depictions of violence and suicide, according to a statement from the district
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
You’re either a really bad troll or an idiot. I hope for your sake You’re a troll.
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I'll have to dig up my copy of Maus, but I don't the nudity. Maybe the Jews/mice were stripped before being killed at the death camps.
I guess if the kids can't handle some low resolution cartoon nudity of mice, maybe they can read The Banality of Evil instead.
Or Rwanda or necklacing in South Africa.
.because the death camps were such happy places.
Next, they'll be tearing down statues...
They're not wrong. The liberal white guy has to save the Black (NYT style guide) man from evil southern rednecks. The liberal guy proves his manhood by being the best rifle shot in town. And they (Harper Lee and Truman Capote) add Boo Radley for some good old Southern Gothic flavor. I never liked To Kill a Mockingbird.
There are many genocides. We are in the midst of an abortion and clot shot genocide now. This one — the holocaust — gets all the attention. As they say - history is written by the winners.
I saw the book “Maus” years ago while browsing a bookstore, and was admittedly a bit puzzled by it. It seemed odd, this theme, in comic book format.
But I think about the first real exposure I had of the Holocaust other than a dry recounting in some history class, when I read a book back in the mid-late Sixties called “I Cannot Forgive”.
It was hard to wrap my head around, I think I may have been 11,or 12 at the oldest, and nobody told me to read it as an assignment or anything like that. There was a lot I couldn’t understand, and it was terrible to read.
But when I looked at that book “Maus” as an adult, I thought how much different reading a book like “I Cannot Forgive might have been if I had looked at something like “Maus” first.
I remember being puzzled by the concept of “Kapos”. It is a pretty evil concept, not just violence, but betrayal on top of that, and I recall having a hard time accepting that people would do that to their own.
Worse, it began to dawn on me what people were capable of doing if they were desperate. Disavow their family, their own children or parents, even their God, just to survive. That was a powerful thing to realize as a kid.
It could be that the concept, and others like it, might be more understandable to a kid who might get it but doesn’t really want to see it.
It was right around that time when I was 11 or 12 that I read a book about the allies who were POW’s of the Japanese. It was a thick, comprehensive account, and not meant for a young kid. I lived in the Philippines, and the memory of the Japanese occupation was still evident. There were the white markers on the route of the Bataan Death March. And I had just spent the last few years in Japan, and liked the Japanese very much.
It was hard to read these accounts of brutality by the Japanese and square them with the friendly people I had known. I think that is what led me to that book about Auschwitz.
I didn’t particularly care for Maus’ portrayal of Poles.
I cannot comment on that per se, since I didn’t do more than browse the book in a book store, back when there were such things.
I will say, I have always admired Poles. But I have wondered about those negative portrayals in many books I have read. I can understand where people would take exception to it.
The truth is, there were many Poles inside the camps who ranged from fat Polish Kapos down to Poles who didn’t know if they were going to survive another hour.
And there were Poles on the outside who helped the Jews where they could, and Poles who openly collaborated with the Nazis. It is a mix.
I presume things were more concentrated in all those things in Poland due to the proximity of so many extermination camps.
But the same can be said for nearly any nationality represented in those camps.
I always note, that no Poles served as guards in the death camps, plenty of Ukrainians did.
Germans knew better than to give a Pole a rifle, because they knew the Pole would shoot them on the spot if they did.
Now, if you choose 10 books for your library, you have BANNED all other books.
An old neighbor of mine, now deceased, was with Patton’s 3rd army and saw those same piles of bodies. Decades after the fact tears would run down his face on the very few occasions he talked about it.
He said the living were the worst.
Scarecrows of skin and bone that a stiff breeze would have knocked over. Their eyes seeing but not comprehending.
In 1987 he told me he could still smell the stench of the camps.
Yeah, the holocaust was real.
Here is a testimony from one who saw the camps first-hand:
Buchenwald - Edward R. Murrow
“If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk
So, all those dead piled up Jews my dad saw while with Patton’s Third Army was just his imagination?
And the LIFE magazine article of the photos of murdered Jews in the areas the Russians recaptured, piled up for burning was fake?
I don’t think so!
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Exactly. And there are photos of those tortured, dying Jews with no clothes on. Wanna make sure that this never happens again? Take our 8th graders to the Holocaust Museum, where they’ll see what really happened.
Based on the description alone, I’d agree that the book is not appropriate for 8th grade.
Meanwhile, the artist should be celebrating all this free advertising for his book.
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