By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine

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 retrieve the remains of the significant Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus from a Soviet labor camp, then 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.

[CORRECTION NOTICE: We found an editorial error in the original review; this online version has been corrected.]