By the second spring : seven lives and one year of the War in Ukraine / Danielle Leavitt.

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An intimate, affecting account of life during wartime, told through the lives that have been shattered.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Americans have identified deeply with the Ukrainian cause, while others have cast doubt on its relevance to their concerns. Meanwhile, 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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, is mostly seen in the U.S. via news footage of tanks, masked soldiers, and demolished homes, schools, and hospitals. Leavitt, who has a PhD in Ukrainian history from Harvard, gives names and faces, personality and identity to seven Ukrainians she met and interviewed during her academic research: an 18-year-old police cadet; a woman in her mid-20s from Mariupol, whose husband joins the defense of their city; a Ukrainian couple from Los Angeles who return to Ukraine to help in the resistance; a woman from southern Ukraine who runs a small pig farm with her husband; a middle-aged man who owns a coffee shop in a suburb of Kyiv; a former engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear plant who worked to free the significant Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus from a Soviet labor camp, then struggled to get Stus a proper burial in his homeland; and a middle-aged woman with two daughters from a small town in eastern Ukraine. All of the people profiled are hopeful and are working, in their own ways, for a free and peaceful future for their homeland. VERDICT Movingly and realistically portrayed, this is an important work of contemporary witness.--Marcia Welsh

Publishers Weekly Review

Historian Leavitt tracks the experiences of seven Ukrainian families in her harrowing debut account of the war's first year. They include Maria, a 20-something mother whose soldier husband Leonid was taken prisoner by the Russians; Tania and Viktor, pig farmers whose village was occupied by Russian troops who looted houses and menaced Ukrainian loyalists; and Yulia and her husband Oleg, who fled the Donbas region for Kramatorsk, where Yulia lost a leg to a Russian missile attack on a train station. (Interspersed throughout are episodes from the Gogol-esque narrative of documentary filmmaker Volodymyr and his effort in 1989 to exhume and repatriate the body of Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus from a Russian gulag.) These are intimate, human-scale stories of anguished survival: people live in cellars for weeks while bombs shake the earth; scrabble for water, firewood, and cell-phone reception after the grid collapses; seethe with anger at neighbors now collaborating with Russian occupiers; tensely calculate whether the danger is serious enough to abandon their homes; and weep for dead loved ones. Leavitt's evocative prose conveys these heartbreaking scenes in unsparing detail. ("Then came a powerful explosion, like the sound of a whip multiplied by a hundred thousand.... Yulia pushed herself to a sitting position.... On the ground next to her were her broken bones.") It's a searing rendition of Ukrainians' suffering. (May)

Booklist Review

Historian Leavitt, a fellow at Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, chronicles the experiences and stories of seven regular Ukrainians living through the unprovoked Russian invasion. Anna, Maria, Polina, Tania, Vitaly, Volodymyr, and Yulia lived very different lives but shared one thing in common: extensive participation in an online diary and humanitarian project run by the institute. From these journals and in-depth interviews, Leavitt pieces together the broad experiences of a representative sample of Ukrainian civilians who serve as proxy for many more wartime lives. She also weaves their personal stories together with accurate and poignant historical facts and the story of Volodymyr's quest to reclaim the remains of three Ukrainian writers from a gulag cemetery in Russia, writers whose works form a chronicle of resistance, poetry and prose in the Ukrainian language that provide spiritual sustenance for soldiers and civilians alike as they battle for independence. By the Second Spring presents invaluable testimony about the cost of war for civilians and is a great addition to the reportage on Ukraine's fight to defend its very existence.

Kirkus Book Review

Affecting portraits of Ukrainians caught up in a war whose origins trace back centuries. A historian who grew up partly in Ukraine, Leavitt writes of the country's lifeways: "the smart and dark sense of humor, minor--key folk songs, old women selling lingerie in underground walkways, how people regard long walks as a primary -form of entertainment." But, she notes, most people outside the country recognize only one Ukrainian by sight or name, Volodymyr Zelensky. Aiming to correct this, Leavitt focuses on ordinary Ukrainians across the country and their experiences in war. One, Vitaly, owns a struggling coffee shop near Kyiv, making most of his living recycling; another, Tania, lives on a pig farm in a Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine and has taken to calling the invaders orcs, "invoking the grotesque, nonhuman characters fromLord of the Rings," or "rashist," "a mix of the words 'Russian' and 'fascist'"; yet another, Maria, is caught in the hellish bombardment of the eastern city of Mariupol until being evacuated to a far-western town where few speak her native Russian, a language "still perceived as an outsider tongue." Apart from offering memorable portraits of her dramatis personae, each of whom copes in one way or another with all the hardships of war and occupation, Leavitt serves up fascinating observations befitting a top-tier ethnography. One track she follows, thanks to Vitaly the recycler and a publisher named Volodymyr, are the changing reading tastes of the Ukrainian public: "In the 1990s, everyone was throwing away Soviet books, manuals, pamphlets, propaganda….In the fall of 2022…Vitaly hauled away vans full of books by anyone who was Russian or represented Russia, even if they had never said anything about Ukraine." Elsewhere she offers helpful explanations of why, despite Russia's imperial ambitions, Ukraine truly is a separate nation--and why it behooves the West to defend it. A vividly written, memorable series of profiles in courage and fierce resistance. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.