Books: Hops and Plana*

FIFTEEN RABBITS — Felix Salten — Simon & Schuster ($1). Mild, somewhat poetic, this exceedingly simple book presents a vision of rabbit life as the Viennese author of Bambi sees it. As in Bambi, which was deer life poeticized, all the birds & beasts of the forest—and finally even the trees— converse freely together in a rather flat idiom, and the majority eat each other with relish and frequency. That, with the doings of sundry hunters, forms the background, foreground and action of the story.

For the rabbits, always hunted, never hunters, life is...