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)

Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)

Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War (Auckland Univers...

2 Feb 20251h 15min

Karel Margry, "Nordhausen Concentration Camp" (After the Battle, 2024)

Karel Margry, "Nordhausen Concentration Camp" (After the Battle, 2024)

In the history of Nazi concentration camps, and particularly labor camps, there is probably no place that bears the same stigma of wretchedness as 'Dora-Mittelbau' at Nordhausen. Located in the Harz m...

31 Jan 20251h 34min

Tolkien, Philosopher of War: A Conversation with Graham McAleer

Tolkien, Philosopher of War: A Conversation with Graham McAleer

In this episode, we explore the profound philosophical and theological dimensions of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, particularly his views on war. In his book Tolkien, Philosopher of War (Catholic University ...

30 Jan 202550min

Edward Westermann, "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest" (U Oklahoma Press, 2016)

Edward Westermann, "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest" (U Oklahoma Press, 2016)

As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United Sta...

29 Jan 20251h 33min

Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s g...

28 Jan 20251h 21min

Viktoriya Fedorchak, "The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power" (Routledge, 2024)

Viktoriya Fedorchak, "The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power" (Routledge, 2024)

Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting powe...

28 Jan 20251h 29min

Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)

Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)

Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024). The wartime interest in Greenland was a direct result of its vit...

27 Jan 20251h 8min

Susan C. I. Grunewald, "From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Susan C. I. Grunewald, "From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union" (Cornell UP, 2024)

With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the So...

26 Jan 20251h 5min

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