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‘Maus’ appears on bestseller lists 40 years after publication because of school book bans

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Days after “Maus” was banned by a Tennessee school board, it has climbed up various bestsellers lists.

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Maus” was written by Art Spiegelman and is a graphic novel about the Holocaust.

At the beginning of last week, neither the original edition nor “The Complete Maus” were among the top 1,000 bestsellers on Amazon, The Associated Press reported.

Now, “Maus” is at No. 3 and “The Complete Maus” is at No. 2 on Amazon’s list as of Monday afternoon.

The book was banned by the McMinn County School Board earlier this month because of “inappropriate language” and an illustration of a nude woman.

The graphic novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize, recounts Spiegelman’s father’s survival of the Holocaust.

Jews are depicted as mice while Nazis were drawn as cats, The New York Times reported.

Spiegelman said of the board’s position that the book contains “disturbing imagery”: “This is disturbing imagery. But you know what? It’s disturbing history,” the Times reported.

“Maus” isn’t the only book that has recently been banned by school districts across the country.

>>Previous coverage: Tennessee school board bans Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust novel ‘Maus’

Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was banned by the Wentzville School Board in Missouri. The story is about a Black girl living after The Great Depression, the “Today” show reported. The book includes profanities and touches on various topics such as domestic violence, racism and rape.

The Saint Louis Post Dispatch reported that the novel frequently appears on the American Library Association’s list of commonly banned books.

But while the book isn’t in high school libraries in Wentzville School District, one board member said she didn’t consider not allowing it to be on library shelves as a ban, but a move to instead protect children from obscenity.

She had a message for parents: “By all means, go buy the book for your child,” she said at the board meeting, according to the newspaper. “I would not want this book in the school for anyone else to see,” the Post Dispatch reported.

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is also being targeted to be banned. The Mukilteo School District voted earlier this month to pull the novel from the required reading list for ninth graders, KIRO reported.

The reason for the school district’s decision was because of racist language and the treatment of the characters of color, the Everett Herald and KIRO reported.





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