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

Danielle Leavitt

ISBN 10: 0374614334 / ISBN 13: 9780374614331

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2025

About this Item

This is a clean book with light wear and the dust jacket has light wear and is in a high quality Demco protector. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 060160

Bibliographic Details

• Title: By the Second Spring: Seven Lives and One Year of the War in Ukraine
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374614334
• ISBN 13: 9780374614331
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Danielle Leavitt holds a PhD in history from Harvard University, where she has been a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute. She grew up in both Ukraine and the United States, and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. By the Second Spring is her first book.