The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Excellent, riveting book, a little slow at the beginning but then you can't put it down.

pictures worth thousands of words

A wonderful page-turning historical story, newly illuminated by masses of photos and maps and documents. I don't own two copies of many books, but this duplicate is so worth it!

More than biography

The author traces his inheritance of a netsuke collection back to the ancestor who first acquired it. In so doing he tells us of the lives of those who have owned it, and of the times and places in which they lived. The collection amazingly survived even a Nazi incursion into the very house where they were displayed, though much else was destroyed; it was preserved by a German woman who was loyal to this Jewish family.

My favorite book this year!

This is fascinating, beautifully written and sensitively observed. I am giving it to those I love the most.

Art & history

This is not jjust all about netsuke, a collection of which the author has inherited, but an excellent historical narrative, after a Parisian episode, of what life was like in Austria, and Vienna in particular, before and after the dissolution and dismemberment in 1918-19 of th Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later, in 1938-39, of the Nazi political, cultural and economic takeover of the country. The Jewish predicament during all these dramatic happenings is espeacially well presented.