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BY THE SECOND SPRING

Name: BY THE SECOND SPRING
Author: Danielle Leavitt
ISBN: 9780374614331

SEVEN LIVES AND ONE YEAR OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE

by Danielle Leavitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2025

A vividly written, memorable series of profiles in courage and fierce resistance.

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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 from Lord 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.

Pub Date: May 20, 2025

ISBN: 9780374614331

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.