Here are 100 books that Max and Moritz fans have personally recommended if you like
Max and Moritz.
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I find it so inspiring to see people pull off something that seems impossible, for example, breaking into a Paris monument every night for a year in order to clandestinely repair its neglected antique clock. So, when an author draws me into a topic that seems to me dry as dust, I enjoy the book so much more than one I knew I’d find interesting.
When I saw this book, translated into English in 2009, I was very skeptical. I’d never enjoyed a graphic novel, and even though I’d enjoyed math in school, I couldn’t imagine reading an entire book devoted to the history of the philosophy of mathematics.
But somehow the sheer audacity of what they had attempted made it catnip to me, and before I knew it, I’d inhaled the whole thing and felt high on the feeling that anything was possible. If this could be a graphic novel, I thought feverishly, couldn’t my old obsession, Maria Lani? If only I could find an illustrator who felt the same way….
This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Raised by his paternal grandparents, young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his yearnings: for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective language with which to describe the world - one free of the biases and slippages of the written word. At the same time, he…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When I was in middle school, I’d spend much of my time in class daydreaming. Imagining myself in, say, a debate with someone I disagree with and going through a litany of scenarios where I’d try to convince that other person to change their mind. It’s a lot of fun. (My teachers would likely disagree.) When I grew older, I did more of that on my daily walks, and then about 11 years ago, I decided to start writing about creative ways to teach someone something they’re vehemently opposed to or just ambivalent about. I’ve published four books since then on this topic.
I bought this book when I first got into the field of data visualization. I wasn’t planning on learning how to create comics; I just wanted to see how someone from a different discipline—a comic artist—thought about position, color, meaning, and communicating a whole lot of things in a compact format.
The bestselling international classic on storytelling and visual communication "You must read this book." - Neil Gaiman Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art form.
I have always loved game design – I love doing it, reading about it, thinking about it, and helping others do it. As you can see in the list, I’ve learned that sometimes what helps game designers most is getting inspiration from other fields. I hope these books help you as much as they helped me.
All game designers struggle with what it means to be creative, and whether they are doing it properly. What It Is and its companion book, Picture This are very personal guides to what it means to be a creative person, and are full of inspirational stories and very practical tips to create your best work and not get in your own way.
"Deliciously drawn (with fragments of collage worked into each page), insightful and bubbling with delight in the process of artistic creation. A+" -Salon
How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material, each page of Barry's first…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Science is a way to make sense of the world, whatever the subject, and so are Comics. We are British and reserved, but passionately love science and comics. There are some excellent comics that tell stories about people - Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home. But, there are fewer that try to explain ideas without a strong biographical bent. Here are five comics that are, we think, just a little bit more about ideas than people. They're also fabulous examples of how well comics can communicate sophisticated information, without hype. and in a way that reaches any thinking person, whatever their age or place in life. We are, respectively, two retired neuroscientists, a children's non-fiction author, and an artist.
We've all grown up reading, and continue to read, comics from Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, and even the USA.
One of those books that tells you about a topic most people never think about - in this case, your trash. Partly semi-autobiographical about the time Backderf spent as a a trash collector but interspersed with general info about America's love of waste and where it all ends up. Backderf's hyper-exaggerated figures render everything fun to read, with a cynical but accurate eye towards human behavior. It's also painstakingly detailed, and the depictions of the gigantic dumps at the edges of towns cannot be unseen. We all know that trash smells terrible - and boy does this book manage to convey how much worse the smell of a whole canyon full of trash can be.
Every week we pile our rubbish out on the pavement. We go to work and when we return it's gone. Like magic! The reality is anything but, of course. Trashed, Derf Backderf's follow-up to the critically acclaimed, award-winning national bestseller My Friend Dahmer, is a working man's epic. An ode to the crap job of all crap jobs-but anyone who has ever been trapped in a soul-sucking gig can relate to this tale. Trashed takes place after Derf graduates high school, when he and his childhood pals find themselves working as garbagemen in their Midwestern hometown. Together they clean the…
I like to write more than I like to read, but when I do read, I want to learn about other places and times besides my own. Since my own novels are contemporary fiction, it makes sense that historical fiction is my favorite category to read. Likewise, my interest in romance isn’t from unrequited love, but rather, a desire to explore the difficulties of choosing a life partner in our complicated world. (Even my detective novels contain romance!) But I don’t like sappy introspective thought processes, a variation of teen angst, and most readers of historical romance have this same aversion. So none of my recommendations will be that way.
Terry Laster, who translated this work from the German original, does a masterful job of expressing the situation in 14th-century Heidelberg when a female secretly heals patients and for her success, is accused of performing works of the devil. In their ignorance, the town council appoints her husband, a lawyer, to discover her identity. How this story resolves is a testament to the power of good works and encourages me when I face opposition from ignorant people.
In the fourteenth century, opportunities for women are limited to the home. But spirited young Madlen finds her calling as assistant to the city's trusted midwife, Clara. Working alongside Clara, Madlen develops a surprisingly soothing technique and quickly becomes a talented healer.
After Clara's tragic death, Madlen alone rushes to assist the birth of a local nobleman's child. But rather than the joy of birth, Madlen walks into an accusation of murder and witchcraft because of her extraordinary gifts. Forced to flee her own town, she establishes a new identity in the home of her aunt. Yet even though it…
I’ve been at least a part-time environmental journalist for more than 25 years, and food and agriculture is arguably the biggest environmental problem—the biggest driver of water shortages, water pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, and the second-biggest driver (after fossil fuels) of climate change. And it occurred to me in 2019 that I didn’t know squat about it! I realized that if I was spectacularly ignorant, others probably were, too, and I’ve been obsessed ever since.
This amazing narrative history of the invention of synthetic fertilizer is arguably a bit off topic, except that the subtitle could have ended: …That Fed the World, But Now Generates 10 Percent of Agricultural Emissions.
Nitrogen fertilizer was probably the most important invention of the 20th century, even more so than TV or the bomb; half the 8 billion people on Earth wouldn’t be here without it.
But the Haber-Bosch chemical process that literally converts fossil fuels into nutrition has created all kinds of environmental problems, including not only greenhouse gases but nitrate pollution that has created a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now a new scientific race is on, because farmers will need to produce 50 percent more calories by 2050 to feed the growing world population, but they’ll have to do it with a lot less fertilizer pollution and other agricultural messes.
A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the Haber-Bosch discovery that changed billions of lives—including your own.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, humanity was facing global disaster: Mass starvation was about to become a reality. A call went out to the world’ s scientists to find a solution.
This is the story of the two men who found it: brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, and saved millions of lives.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a historian at the University of Amsterdam, one of my concerns is to understand why so many Germans supported and participated in Adolf Hitler’s atrocious political project. I am equally interested in the other side: the Nazis’ political opponents and victims. In two decades of researching, writing, and teaching, I have read large numbers of official documents, newspapers, diaries, novels, and memoirs. These contemporary texts have made me vividly aware of how different people lived through the Nazi years, how they envisioned their lives, and how they remembered them after World War II. The questions they faced and the solutions they found continue to challenge and disconcert me.
Prefer to learn about Nazi Germany through literature? Try this novel by Irmgard Keun, who excelled at writing from the perspective of different young women. Here, nineteen-year-old Sanna relates how her life has changed under the Third Reich. She encounters people who express unqualified admiration for Adolf Hitler or at least concede that the Nazis are right about many things, who enjoy denouncing others or adapting to the new rules of the game. With her naïve understanding and unsophisticated language, Sanna lays bare vain pretensions, catchy slogans, and ponderous pseudo-profundities. She can’t understand why she should listen to Nazi speeches and avoid Jews. Contacts with critical friends finally compel her to leave Germany—just like her literary creator, who published her novel in exile in the Netherlands.
Depicting a young woman's life in Nazi Germany, a masterpiece from the author of Child of All Nations
'I cannot think of anything else that conjures up so powerfully the atmosphere of a nation turned insane' Sunday Telegraph
Nineteen-year-old Sanna just wants to drink her beer in peace, but that's difficult when Hitler has come to town and his motorcade is blocking the streets of Frankfurt. What's more, her best friend Gerti is in love with a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted and her own aunt may denounce her to the authorities at any moment,…
I am an author, illustrator, and designer who has always been passionate about books, and especially picture books. As a child I loved to look at the pictures, listen to my mom read them out loud to me, and dream about them. Today I am making my own! Knowing that now it’s my books that kids are reading, gives me a true sense of purpose and joy. A few of the things I care about (other than books) are spending time in nature with my cute senior dog, learning new things, riding my bike, neurodiversity, climate advocacy, and new ways of thinking and problem-solving.
I wanted to introduce a book and author who is very famous in Germany but practically unheard of here in North America. This one was one of my favourites when I was a little kid. In Little Tiger, Get Well Soon, Tiger is not feeling well and Bear takes care of him. When Bear brings Tiger to the hospital, it turns out one of the tiger's stripes has gotten dislocated and needs to be adjusted. A touching and hilarious story about two friends who are always there for each other but also about how going to the hospital doesn’t have to be scary at all!
I was born in a log house in Alberta, Canada. I was nineteen months old in August 1939 when my parents decided we should visit my grandmother in Germany and thirteen when we returned. I have been deeply affected by the stories of ordinary families and the trauma they experienced after WWII. To this day, like thousands of others, I feel tremendous inherited discomfort from Nazism and the Holocaust. Our parents' generation did not talk about their wartime experiences, so we must preserve this important part of history and help to relieve the guilt many innocent individuals still harbor while raising awareness of this immensely damaging aspect of war.
I don’t usually read graphic novels, but this book struck a chord with me. Because of its unique style, I expect it will help create an awareness of the impact WWII had on generations of Germans who were born too late to have had any part in it.
The author's graphic memoir describes her journey back to Germany in search of her family’s politics during the war. Even though she finds that her maternal grandfather, like my father, was exonerated of war crimes, she does not feel she can accept forgiveness for the unforgivable suffering of millions.
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, andLibrary Journal
This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I first went to Berlin after college, determined to write a novel about the German Resistance; I stayed a quarter of a century. Initially, the Berlin Airlift, something remembered with pride and affection, helped create common ground between me as an American and the Berliners. Later, I was commissioned to write a book about the Airlift and studied the topic in depth. My research included interviews with many participants including Gail Halvorsen. These encounters with eyewitnesses inspired me to write my current three-part fiction project, Bridge to Tomorrow. With Russian aggression again threatening Europe, the story of the airlift that defeated Soviet state terrorism has never been more topical.
Nothing epitomizes the striking success of the Berlin Airlift more than the true story of the so-called “candy bomber.”
This was a USAF pilot who on his own initiative started dropping candy tied to handcrafted mini-parachutes out of his transport plane to give the children of Berlin a little sweetness in their otherwise bleak lives. His gesture more than any transformed the “terror bombers”—responsible for so much of Berlin’s destruction—into friends in the eyes of the Berliners.
This book is an autobiographical account by the candy bomber himself, Lt. Gail Halvorsen. It is written with candid clarity and heartwarming charm. A gem!
The Berlin Candy Bomber is a love story-how two sticks of gum and one man's kindness to the children of a vanquished enemy grew into an epic of goodwill spanning the globe-touching the hearts of millions in both Germany and America.
In June 1948, Russia laid siege to Berlin, cutting off the flow of food and supplies over highways into the city. More than two million people faced economic collapse and starvation. The Americans, English, and French began a massive airlift to bring sustenance to the city and to thwart the Russian siege.
