Best of
Ukraine

2018

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe


Serhii Plokhy - 2018
    Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill.In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else.Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.

Bayan


Pramudith D. Rupasinghe - 2018
    Bayan begins in the sunny Ukrainian summer and ends with a hidden, deeply meaningful message. It is not only the story of a strange, bearded old man who finds solace and a soulmate of sorts, in a traditional string instrument, while facing a common narrative of his era; it is a commentary on life, and a celebration of the ultimate coming of age. It juxtaposes the failure of physical strength and faculties to the accumulation of immense emotional fortitude. It lulls you into feeling safe in spite of the passing of transient seasons, the waning of political ideologies and the inevitable disintegration of the corporeal being. Bayan tells about changing world`s order, revolutions and the ravages of time, the music of life will go on.

The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution


Marci Shore - 2018
    In this lyrical and intimate book, Marci Shore evokes the human face of the Ukrainian Revolution. Grounded in the true stories of activists and soldiers, parents and children, Shore’s book blends a narrative of suspenseful choices with a historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. She gently sets her portraits of individual revolutionaries against the past as they understand it—and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, she provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.

ERA EMILIA


I.I. Mendor - 2018
    They remain in the town which is empty from the radiation and fear, raising the child as a Superhuman, and revealing to her the knowledge, which could change life on Earth forever.But what happens if the creatures disappear as suddenly as they appeared? What happens if the Earth desperately defends its secrets? Will Emilia build a new Babylon?When the apocalypse becomes yesterday, when the religion blesses sinners, and science – dreamers, when a miracle becomes commonplace, when birth becomes the end, and the end becomes the beginning, a new era will come. Era Emilia…

Portraits Without Frames


Lev Ozerov - 2018
    Some of the subjects—like Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Andrey Platonov, and Dmitry Shostakovich—are well-known, others less so. All are evoked with great subtlety and vividness, as is the fraught and dangerous time in which they lived. Composed in free verse of deceptively artless simplicity, Ozerov’s portraits are like nothing else in Russian poetry.The fifty figures are grouped into these sections: The PoetsThe Prose WritersThe Yiddish PoetsSoviet UkraineThe Visual ArtistsMusic, Theater, and Dance