Nonfiction Book Club: The Hare with Amber Eyes

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Program Type:

Book Club, Authors & Books

Age Group:

Adult
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The library's Nonfiction Book Club meets the third Monday each month at 1 PM. All are welcome.

Whenever possible, copies of each month's title will be available for checkout with a library card.

Registration is optional - register to receive reminders!

This club will be held in hybrid format. Come in person at the library, or attend online! Click this link to connect via Zoom. Password: 3GWdHC

For more book groups, visit cityofportsmouth.com/library/book-discussion-groups.

 

The Hare with Amber Eyes  by Edmund de Waal
Monday December 19 | 7 PM

Edmund de Waal is a world-famous ceramicist. Having spent thirty years making beautiful pots―which are then sold, collected, and handed on―he has a particular sense of the secret lives of objects. When he inherited a collection of 264 tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke, he wanted to know who had touched and held them, and how the collection had managed to survive.

And so begins The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinarily moving memoir and detective story as de Waal discovers both the story of the netsuke and of his family, the Ephrussis, over five generations. A nineteenth-century banking dynasty in Paris and Vienna, the Ephrussis were as rich and respected as the Rothchilds. Yet by the end of the World War II, when the netsuke were hidden from the Nazis in Vienna, this collection of very small carvings was all that remained of their vast empire.