Jonathan Mirsky
My Father’s Roses by Nancy Kohner (Hodder, £18.99) recalls the bourgeois, non-observant Jewish world of central Europe from which Ms Kohner’s father, an émigré to England, was lucky to emerge alive. A dandy and an energetic gardener, he had to represent relatives who had perished in the gas chambers, one of whom, his sister, a quirky realist, knew she would never escape the Nazis.
Philip Pan is an American-Chinese with plenty of China left in him. In Out of Mao’s Shadow (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) he describes how, when he was the Washington Post’s man in Beijing, he tracked down Chinese who — heroically seems a paltry word — took on and troubled the system.
The Spectator’s reviewer disliked Philip Hoare’s Leviathan or the Whale (Fourth Estate, 18.99). I loved it. What family creatures whales are, whose songs communicate over hundreds of miles with fellow pod members. Moby-Dick, about which Hoare has plenty to say, has given whales a bad name. Most of all, I liked the novels I re-read. This year, the two best were Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and Death of the Heart.
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