{ "item_title" : "By the Second Spring", "item_author" : [" Danielle Leavitt "], "item_description" : "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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/461/433/0374614334_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "30.00", "online_price" : "30.00", "our_price" : "30.00", "club_price" : "30.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "30.00" } }

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In By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine, Danielle Leavitt portrays Ukrainians not as cartoon superheroes or helpless victims, but as normal human beings. Leavitt, an American, has spent much of her life in Ukraine, falling in love with its people, culture and history, and earned a Ph.D. in Ukrainian history from Harvard. When the war began in 2022, she took part in a project where Ukrainians could record their wartime experiences. Inspired by these oral histories, Leavitt eventually contacted the seven people whose stories she tells in this remarkable book.

All seven are extraordinarily ordinary. Tania is a pig farmer from south Ukraine, Vitaly owns a coffee shop in a town near Kyiv and Maria is a young wife and mother from Mariupol. Anna is a police cadet in Luhansk, Polina is a fashion designer who lived in the U.S. before the war and Yulia is a craftswoman from eastern Ukraine. Volodymyr is an engineer who used to work in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but is now a writer and director. While their particulars are unique, the stories generally follow the same pattern over the course of the first year and a half of the war: the violent end of their prewar life and a shocking descent into hell before finally adapting to life in a daily state of war, punctuated by the loss of homes, hideous injuries and the deaths of friends.

Leavitt provides historical context to demonstrate how Putin’s war is a continuation of Russian oppression dating from the czarist and Soviet empires, and skillfully uses the seven stories to reveal the full magnitude of that history. Volodymyr’s 1989 effort to exhume and rebury the body of a Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet gulag in 1985 reflects not only Russian hostility, but also Ukrainian persistence. Tania’s refusal to leave her farm and Vitaly’s decision to rebuild his café are the result of their dogged determination to remain human and Ukrainian in the face of Putin’s determination to subjugate them. By the Second Spring celebrates the ordinary people who ultimately are heroes because of their humanity, not despite it.