The San Diego Sunday Breakfast and Books Group Meetup

Please bring cash. Not all of our venues will give separate checks.

Our book for this month will be "The Hare With Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal. A brief description follows. Please join us for breakfast and an informal discussion. I usually arrive early and ask to be seated, but I always alert the host that we are a book club, so please feel free to ask for the book club table.

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 origins 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.