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)

Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy

Simon Kuznets and the Invention of the Economy

Economics sometimes feels like a physics–so sturdy, so objective, and so immutable. Yet, behind every clean number or eye-popping graph, there is usually a rather messy story, a story shaped by values...

27 Okt 20241h 3min

John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)

John Freed, “Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth” (Yale UP, 2016)

For all of his importance as a medieval ruler, there are surprisingly few biographies in English of the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1122-1190). John Freed fills this gap with his new book,...

22 Okt 20241h 11min

Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary t...

22 Okt 202452min

Eran Ortal, "Battle Before the War: The Inside Story of the IDF's Transformation" (Dado Center, 2023)

Eran Ortal, "Battle Before the War: The Inside Story of the IDF's Transformation" (Dado Center, 2023)

A critical challenge for militaries is preparing for future, not past, wars. History shows that success often depends on accurately interpreting and harnessing technological and societal changes. In t...

20 Okt 202459min

E. L. Gaston, "Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria" (Columbia UP, 2024)

E. L. Gaston, "Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria" (Columbia UP, 2024)

Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critics have argued that such partnerships have many per...

19 Okt 20241h

Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017)

Thomas Weber, “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic Books, 2017)

Few would dispute that Hitler’s ideas led to war and genocide. Less clear however, is how and when those ideas developed. In his latest book, Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (Basic Books, 2017),...

18 Okt 20241h 11min

Rachel O'Sullivan, "Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Rachel O'Sullivan, "Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population manageme...

16 Okt 20241h 1min

Donald R. Hickey, "Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America" (Westholme, 2023)

Donald R. Hickey, "Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America" (Westholme, 2023)

The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as "the Prophet") had a vis...

14 Okt 202434min

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