In Wartime

Starred review from August 29, 2016
With this fascinating and often grim portrait of Ukraine, Judah, a journalist who previously covered the Balkan wars, contributes to a greater Western understanding of the country since the Maidan revolution, Russia’s capture of Crimea, and the Russian-backed uprising in the eastern Donbass region in 2014. This work stands out by splitting the difference between a purely journalistic account and a scholarly analysis. Judah offers a compassionate human view of these conflicts, mixing personal stories, history, politics, and reportage to document “what Ukraine is really like and what its people have to say.” He travels through the country’s distinct regions and shares anecdotes from a number of people he encounters there, including academics, government officials, teachers, doctors, and more colorful characters such as a “turbocharged” 59-year-old zookeeper and an 87-year-old “bomb shelter poet.” Judah describes a vast, complex society in the midst of an uncertain, frozen conflict, and a country rife with corruption, political and ethnic divisions, and misinformation. Despite clearly evident splits in loyalties and a wide range of opinions on the current situation, ordinary people are often more concerned with their immediate needs than geopolitical struggles. Judah’s special and timely book will provide lay readers with an apt introduction to Ukraine, and specialists will appreciate its atypical yet enlightening approach and its insights into the social aspects of ongoing conflicts. Maps & photos.

Making sense of the murderous muddle in Ukraine through touching personal stories and a historical reality check.Economist reporter Judah (Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2008, etc.) was not content to accept at face value the stories he heard from the Ukrainians on either side of the recent "Maidan Revolution" of 2014--either from pro-Ukrainian nationalists or pro-Russian rebels. So he traveled the country, asked uncomfortable but necessary questions, and heard vast differences between the country's west and east in terms of each side's skewed sense of history, especially regarding the Soviet Union's role in Ukrainian history and World War II. While the rebels see Russian president Vladimir Putin as a savior, a strongman who harkens back to a triumphal and unified Soviet state, the pro-Ukrainians champion Stepan Bandera, a controversial nationalist leader from WWII whose party was by turns German collaborationist, anti-Soviet, anti-Polish, and anti-Semitic. For these reasons and for the pro-Ukrainian adoption of the red and black flag from this problematic time, the rebels now denounce the nationalists as "fascist" and neo-Nazi. The pro-Russian rebels, on the other hand, conveniently downplay much of the gruesome Soviet treatment of Ukraine, including the Holodomor (the great famine years after collectivization of 1932-1933, in which more than 3 million died), the gulags and secret police, the roundup of Jews, and the huge displacement of peoples during and after WWII. In his brief chapters, Judah moves from west to east, from Lviv (once heavily Polish and Jewish and connected to the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to Chernobyl to Kiev to Bessarabia to Donetsk, the heart of the separatist region. Everywhere, Ukrainians conveyed to the author their sense of yearning for something lost: huge numbers of people have fled the country, mostly the educated youth, leaving in their wake an "economic death." An enlightening, timely study of a misunderstood region of the world. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2016
Judah (Kosovo, 2008) presents a collection of new and previously published pieces about Ukraine, which is in the midst of its greatest upheaval since independence in 1991, written with a mastery of the terrain honed by years of regional reporting for the BBC, the Times, Economist, and New York Review of Books. Judah captures the stark Soviet-era economic and social-engineering projects that wildly changed the local economies and ethnic makeup of many Ukrainian towns. He portrays a variety of people who pin their hopes of a brighter future alternatively on tighter European integration, stronger Ukrainian nationalism, or Russian rule, revealing the impossibility of a single national narrative. Notably missing are stories from Crimea, which did not grant Judah a travel visa after the 2014 Russian annexation. The inclusion of deep historical background, area maps, and statistical data makes this a great resource for understanding the ongoing fight for control of Europe's second largest country and all the other conflicts currently in play. A valuable addition to European history, politics, and military collections.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2016

This book does not, nor does it try to, explore all of the complex and historical causes of the current crisis in Ukraine. Instead, Judah (The Serbs) takes a journalistic approach toward uncovering the emotions, attitudes, misunderstandings, history, and desires of ordinary people in the region, creating a picture of the country as a whole, present and past. Each chapter roughly focuses on one individual, with interviewees scattered throughout Ukraine. From leaders of the breakaway Donetsk People's Republic in the east to mothers of revolutionaries in distant L'viv in the west, seaport-owning burgeoning oligarchs outside Odessa, and schoolteachers, pensioners, soldiers, and even the minister of finance in between. Throughout, those for and against the Maiden protests and its aftermath understand that war is changing the landscape forever, and that the vast majority of the region's citizens only want peace and normalcy. VERDICT This book provides a new look at the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how Western interest has waned. It will appeal to those seeking to understand the area's history, present, and possible future on a more personal level. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/16.]--Zebulin Evelhoch, Central Washington Univ. Lib.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016

Readers of the Economist and the New York Review of Books will be familiar with Judah's excellent reporting from hot spots worldwide. Here he addresses Ukraine, clarifying a century of conflict while capturing the ongoing crisis. As older interviewees recall from colliding perspectives past invasion, deportation, and genocide, Judah portrays mothers tending their soldier sons' freshly dug graves and Russian-friendly citizens having second thoughts about the separatist movement.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2016

Harvard history professor, faculty director of the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library, and finalist for the George Washington Book Prize, Kamensky also coauthored the novel Blind Spot, working with fellow historian Jill Lepore to craft a tale about an 18th-century Scottish American painter. Thus she should bring insight to this study of Boston-born loyalist painter John Singleton Copley, whose broad canvases of the American Revolution showed it as Britain's American War.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.