Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

Danielle Leavitt, "By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered. Even as scores of Americans rally to the Ukrainian cause and adopt Volodymyr Zelensky as a hero, the lives of Ukrainians remain opaque and mostly anonymous. In By the Second Spring, the historian Danielle Leavitt goes beyond familiar portraits of wartime heroism and victimhood to reveal the human experience of the conflict. An American who grew up in Ukraine, Leavitt draws on her deep familiarity with the country and a unique trove of online diaries to track a diverse group of Ukrainians through the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Among others, we meet Vitaly, whose plans to open a coffee bar in a Kyiv suburb come to naught when the Russian army marches through his town and his apartment building is split in two by a rocket; Anna, who drops out of the police academy and begins a tumultuous relationship with a soldier she meets online; and Polina, a fashion-industry insider who returns home from Los Angeles with her American husband to organize relief. To illuminate the complex resurgence of Ukraine’s national spirit, Leavitt also tells the story of Volodymyr Shovkoshitniy—a nuclear engineer at Chernobyl who went on to lead a daring campaign in the late 1980s to return the bodies of three Ukrainian writers who’d died in a Soviet gulag. Writing with closeness and compassion, Leavitt has given us an interior history of Europe’s largest land war in seventy-five years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Episoder(1614)

Jeremy A. Yellen, "Japan at War, 1914-1952" (Routledge, 2024)

Jeremy A. Yellen, "Japan at War, 1914-1952" (Routledge, 2024)

Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in thi...

10 Jun 20251h

Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Elizabeth N. Saunders, "The Insiders' Game: How Elites Make War and Peace" (Princeton UP, 2024)

One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful. How,...

9 Jun 202547min

Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in the shadows. The US Intelligence Communit...

9 Jun 20251h 4min

Charles J Esdaile, "The Spanish Civil War: A Military History" (Routledge, 2019)

Charles J Esdaile, "The Spanish Civil War: A Military History" (Routledge, 2019)

The Spanish Civil War: A Military History takes a new, military approach to the conflict that tore Spain apart from 1936 to 1939. In many histories, the war has been treated as a primarily political ...

8 Jun 20251h 57min

 Geoffrey Wawro, "The Vietnam War: A Military History" (Basic Books, 2024)

Geoffrey Wawro, "The Vietnam War: A Military History" (Basic Books, 2024)

The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosion of US influence around the world. Long after th...

6 Jun 20251h 8min

James Graham Wilson, "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

James Graham Wilson, "America's Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan" (Cornell UP, 2024)

In America's Cold Warrior, James Graham Wilson traces Paul Nitze's career path in national security after World War II, a time when many of his mentors and peers returned to civilian life. Serving in ...

5 Jun 20251h 11min

Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Roger Chickering, "The German Empire, 1871–1918" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Furious economic growth and social change resulted in pervasive civic conflict in Imperial Germany. Roger Chickering presents a wide-ranging history of this fractious period, from German national unif...

4 Jun 202553min

Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons "Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)

Joshua Howe and Alexander Lemons "Warbody: A Marine Sniper and the Hidden Violence of Modern Warfare" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)

A friendship between an environmental historian and a chronically ill US Marine yields a powerful exploration into the toxic effects of war on the human body. Alexander Lemons is a Marine Corps scout...

1 Jun 20251h 6min

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