“Maus,” the decades-old graphic novel about the effects of the Holocaust on a family, has a bestseller on Amazon in recent days as part of a backlash over the announcement that it was banned by a Tennessee school board from its eighth-grade program. . .
The McMinn County School Board says it has taken that step. On Jan. 10 because of a handful of profanities and other facets of the Pulitzer Prize-winning e-book he found disturbing, adding “his description of violence and suicide. “The board’s resolution was unanimous.
The book, which he created through Art Spiegelman, is part of a Holocaust-focused program, in which one of his parents lived in concentration camps.
“The Complete Maus” on Friday ranked first among Amazon’s bestsellers in the comics and graphic novels category, fourth in literature and 5th in biography.
“Maus I” and “Maus II,” books published in the past that combine into “The Complete Maus,” have also made it to other, more sensitive places on Amazon’s bestseller lists since Wednesday afternoon, when news of the ban broke.
In addition to sparking an avalanche of lawsuits over the e-book on Amazon, the ban through McMinn’s board of directors prompted others to make the e-book more available to readers.
One of them, Professor Scott Denham of Davidson College in North Carolina, offers eighth-graders and top schools in McMinn County an online course on “Maus. “
“I have taught Spiegelman’s books several times in my categories on the Holocaust for many years,” Denham said on his website.
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Richard Davis, the owner of the Nirvana Comics bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, lends “The Complete Maus” to any student.
Davis, whose store is located less than 15 miles from McMinn County, has also organized a GoFundMe crusade to buy more copies of “Maus” to lend and give away to students. That effort seamlessly exceeded its initial $10,000 purpose Friday afternoon.
“We’re getting requests from all over the country, including from Europe, asking for copies,” Davis said.
He believes the strangely strong reaction reflects the view that “this is not what we do in America: ‘we don’t ban books. ‘”
“It’s a very American response,” he said.
A donor on the page wrote: “Banned books are among the most important, and ‘Maus’, especially at this time, is very, very important. “
The of the ebook told CNBC in an email, “I’m encouraged by the responses from readers and the local responses you mentioned. “
“The school board may have consulted with his predecessor banning books, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin: he made the Russian edition of Maus illegal in 2015 (also with clever intentions: banning swastikas) and the small publisher sold and had to reprint several times,” Spiegelman wrote.
“The Streisand struck again,” he added, referring to the phenomenon, named after superstar singer Barbra Streisand, of an effort to ban something, prompting greater public awareness of the matter.
Spiegelman, 73, also told CNBC that his convention agent is “trying to coordinate a public/Zoom occasion for the McMinn where I’m going. . . talk and answer questions about Maus with local citizens (hopefully teachers, students, clergy, etc. ) in the coming weeks. “
The school board president did not respond to a request for comment on the increased sales of the e-book or Spiegelman’s comments.
McMinn’s ban wasn’t widely known until Wednesday, when a local online news outlet, The Tennessee Holler, made it public.
The book, which won a Pulitzer in 1992, tells the story of Spiegelman’s parents in Nazi death camps, the mass murder of other Jews and his mother’s suicide years later.
In “Maus”, other people’s teams are depicted as other types of animals: Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, and Nazi Germans are cats.
Minutes of the McMinn School Board assembly that led to the book ban show that while some parents said they supported the concept of Holocaust training, they had problems with some profanity in the book. They also had a challenge with a symbol that showed a , who is Spiegelman’s mother.
“We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history,” board member Mike Cochran said, according to minutes of the meeting. “We can tell you precisely what happened, but we don’t want all the nudity and everything else. “
But the U. S. Holocaust Museum A U. S. citizen in Washington, D. C. , challenged that concept in a tweet Wednesday after the ban was announced, saying that “‘Maus’ played an important role in Holocaust education” and that “teaching about Holocaust books like Maus can motivate scholars. “to think critically about the afterlife and their own roles and everyday jobs today. “
Spiegelman told CNBC on Wednesday that “I’ve met so many people . . . who learned things from my book” about the Holocaust.
Davis, of Nirvana Comics in Knoxville, agreed.
“‘Maus’ replaced my life, ‘Maus’ replaced the way I saw the world,” Davis said in an interview Friday, noting that “I had read it dozens of times and sobbed every time. “
He said the book “rises above its original support. It’s more than a comic book, it’s a vital ancient document that presents one of the most horrific moments in history. “
But Davis also said the fact that “Maus” is a graphic novel makes it “probably the most effective e-book for training about the Holocaust, especially schoolchildren. “
“Today’s teenagers are used to reading comics,” he said. “‘Maus’ is a very heavy read, the format of the graphic novel makes it more accessible. “
“This is one of the books that each and every one reads, and it’s in each and every school curriculum,” he said.
Davis said that “the end result of the ban reflects negatively on Tennessee because it perpetuates the feeling that other people in the South are behind. “
He said that “sadly, we are at a time” where a complaint or a handful of court cases can lead to the banning of an e-book like “Maus. “
“I’m the [McMinn] parents and the school board had good intentions and the idea that they were protecting their children,” she said.
“But I think those parents, with their clever intentions, had very negative results. I think they’re hurting their kids by preventing them from reading books like ‘Maus,'” Davis said. “They visualize to protect everything from children. “
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