Marci Shore

Harvard Book Store welcomes Yale professor and award-winning author MARCI SHORE for a discussion of her latest book, The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

About The Ukrainian Night

What is worth dying for? While the world watched the uprising on the Maidan as an episode in geopolitics, those in Ukraine during the extraordinary winter of 2013–14 lived the revolution as an existential transformation: the blurring of night and day, the loss of a sense of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, the imperative to make choices.

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.

Praise

“As a guide, a 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.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956

“An excellent guide to understanding the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, and its consequences. Shore has deep knowledge of the region, its history, and its current torment, and offers a lucid evaluation of the complicated evolution of Eastern Europe, which faces a dangerous situation. Her book is well written and honestly and deeply documented through direct and acute observations of facts on the ground.” —Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor of European Studies and Writer in Residence, Bard College

“Shore has the rare capacity to listen to hundreds of voices and turn them into both story and history—the finest possible achievement for any writer. In this book, she brings to life the protests and revolution in Ukraine from 2013-2014 by pairing personal anecdotes with political and historical analysis, showing readers how violence can affect one’s own friends and acquaintances, inspiring them to start a revolution.” —Slavenka Drakulic, author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed