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

Avsnitt(1614)

David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009)

David Stahel, “Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East” (Cambridge UP, 2009)

This week’s podcast is an interview with David Stahel. I will be talking to him about his 2009 work, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East (Cambridge University Press, 2009). One of ou...

13 Feb 20121h 3min

Cynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914” (LSU Press, 2010)

Cynthia Wachtell, “War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914” (LSU Press, 2010)

My favorite book as a teenager (and in fact the only book I ever read as a teenager) was All Quiet on the Western Front. I liked it mostly for the vivid scenes of trench warfare. Teenage boys love tha...

3 Feb 20121h 7min

Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” (Harvard UP, 2011)

Artemy Kalinovsky, “A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan” (Harvard UP, 2011)

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globaliz...

16 Jan 20121h 5min

Michael Matheny, “Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)

Michael Matheny, “Carrying the War to the Enemy: American Operational Art to 1945” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011)

Ask many military historians about the origins of American operational art and many will place it sometime after the Second World War. Conventional wisdom has long held that the American military only...

16 Dec 201155min

Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011)

Timothy Nunan, “Carl Schmitt, ‘Writings on War'” (Polity Press, 2011)

Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was the author of numerous influential books and essays on political theory, law, and other subjects. In Carl Schmitt: Writings on War (Polity Press, 2011), Rhodes Scholar Tim...

25 Okt 20111h 7min

Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)

Peter Mauch, “Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War” (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011)

Peter Mauch‘s Sailor Diplomat: Nomura Kichisaburo and the Japanese-American War (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exhaustively researched and very rich biographical account of the man who w...

17 Okt 20111h 2min

David J. Ulbrich, “Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943” (Naval Institute Press, 2011).

David J. Ulbrich, “Preparing for Victory: Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943” (Naval Institute Press, 2011).

The story of the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific Theatre in the Second World War is no doubt quite familiar to our listeners. Less well known, however, is the story of how the Marine Corps r...

5 Okt 20111h 11min

John Grenier, “The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

John Grenier, “The Far Reaches of Empire: War in Nova Scotia, 1710-1760” (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

For many readers, colonial history begins and ends with the original 13 American colonies. This perception overlooks the other British colonies throughout the New World, each of which created their ow...

23 Sep 201146min

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