The world watched as Ukrainians defended their right to choose a European future during the winter of 2013-2014. Marci Shore’s latest book, “The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution,” explains the human face of the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Euro-Maidan.
The book chronicles the stories of activists, soldiers, parents and children, blending their stories with the historian’s reflections on what revolution is and what it means. These individual portraits of revolutionaries are presented against the past as they understand it – and the future as they hope to make it. In so doing, the author provides a lesson about human solidarity in a world, our world, where the boundary between reality and fiction is ever more effaced.
Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Gulag: A History,” and her most recent book, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” offered praise for “The Ukrainian Night.” “As a guide, an historian and a storyteller, Shore shows us the complex choices faced by the Ukrainians by artfully interweaving their personal experiences with the intellectual, social and political history of the region,” Ms. Applebaum wrote.
The book’s press release material noted: “The Maidan proved to be the most existentially transformative moment in Eastern Europe since 1989. It illuminated questions both particular and universal: Has 21st century oligarchy made democracy impossible? What is the meaning of revolution in a postmodern age? In ‘The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution,’ award-winning historian Marci Shore gives us a completely new way of looking at the events of the Maidan. Shore shows us revolution not as geopolitics, but as lived experience. She tells the stories of individuals – parents, children, activists, soldiers, Jews and Christians, speakers of Russian, Ukrainian and many other languages. Through their personal accounts, Shore explores powerful questions about revolution: What is worth dying for? What brings parents and children together and what splits generations apart? Under what circumstances does fear disappear? And more.”
Prof. Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University and award-winning author of “Caviar and Ashes” and “The Taste of Ashes.” She has spent much of her adult life in Central and Eastern Europe.
Readers may purchase copies at local booksellers and online retailers, including Yale University Press, www.yalebooks.yale.edu.