Here are 100 books that The Tragedy of Ukraine fans have personally recommended if you like
The Tragedy of Ukraine.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
For 30 years, my books, articles, and talks have warned the U.S. failure/refusal to work with Russia and the Europeans to forge a new system of global security after the Cold War could provoke a Russian nationalist backlash, a war between Moscow and Kyiv, and possibly major power conflict. My bookWorld War Trump warned that Trump could stage a coup. Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy warned Biden’s support for Ukraine would provoke conflict with Russia. I have also written poems and novels on IR theory, plus two novels based on my experiences in China during the tumultuous years of 1988-89 and in France during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This well-researched book, using prime sources, is an objective and important history. It explains why Washington failed to forge a new European security order in working with Moscow at the end of the “first” Cold War.
Sarotte examines the question as to why Mikhail Gorbachev appeared to be promised by then-US Secretary of State James Baker (and other Western officials) that NATO membership would not expand beyond East Germany at the time of German unification. Just as importantly, Sarotte’s book examines why the US-proposed “Partnership for Peace”―which could have helped to establish a new system of security for eastern European states with Russian cooperation, in my view―was not pursued.
Instead, as I had argued in Dangerous Crossroads, Clinton opted to pursue the NATO “Self-Limitation” approach (no troops, no nuclear weapons), knowing full well that both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had warned that NATO’s expansion without strong Russian input…
A leading expert on foreign policy reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics in a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2021
"Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret documents-including many that have never been published before-which both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides."-Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker
"The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available."-Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs
Prize-winning historian, M.E. Sarotte pulls back the curtain on the crucial decade between…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Plokhy is a renowned Ukrainian-American historian who makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. His partisan, pro-Ukraine narrative of the war and its origins is vigorous and informative.
Of particular value is his highly illuminating account of the triangular relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States in the run-up to the war.
Despite repeated warnings from the White House, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. Why did Putin start the war-and why has it unfolded in previously unimaginable ways? Ukrainians have resisted a superior military; the West has united, while Russia grows increasingly isolated.
Serhii Plokhy, a leading historian of Ukraine and the Cold War, offers a definitive account of this conflict, its origins, course, and the already apparent and possible future consequences. Though the current war began eight years before the all-out assault-on February 27, 2014, when Russian armed forces seized the building of the Crimean…
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is Putin’s war. Putin took the decision to invade Ukraine. He is the one who will decide how far the Russian army penetrates into Ukraine and how and when the war will end.
To understand the war’s causes, course, and consequences, we need to get inside Putin’s head. Philip Short’s is by far the best Putin biography. What impressed me most was Short’s dedication to avoiding stereotypes and telling Putin’s amazing story as truthfully as he could.
'Anyone wanting to learn more about Putin's personality, ideas, power...should read this outstanding biography' Ian Kershaw, author of Personality and Power
This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Ukraine today.
Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia.
Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
The Ukraine crisis began in 2014 with the popular "Maidan" uprising that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president. Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula was followed by civil war and the takeover by pro-Russian rebels of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Sakwa focuses on the international factors that exacerbated internal splits within Ukraine. Crucially, the crisis might have been avoided altogether if the United States, EU, and NATO had found a way to incorporate Russia into the post-Cold War order in Europe that emerged after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The unfolding crisis in Ukraine has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War. As Russia and Ukraine tussle for Crimea and the eastern regions, relations between Putin and the West have reached an all-time low. How did we get here? Richard Sakwa here unpicks the context of conflicted Ukrainian identity and of Russo-Ukrainian relations and traces the path to the recent disturbances through the events which have forced Ukraine, a country internally divided between East and West, to choose between closer union with Europe or its historic ties with Russia. In providing the first full account…
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
Political scientists Arel and Driscoll deal with the period between the Maidan revolt of 2014 and the 2022 invasion.
They point out that the Maidan events provoked a three-way split in Ukraine between pro-Western Ukrainians, pro-Russia Ukrainians, and those in the middle who wanted neither to join the Russian Federation nor to distance themselves from it. Most of these neutrals remained loyal to the Ukrainian nationalist government in Kyiv and continued to do so after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013-2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a 'civil war' in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. The book explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance…
For 30 years, my books, articles, and talks have warned the U.S. failure/refusal to work with Russia and the Europeans to forge a new system of global security after the Cold War could provoke a Russian nationalist backlash, a war between Moscow and Kyiv, and possibly major power conflict. My bookWorld War Trump warned that Trump could stage a coup. Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy warned Biden’s support for Ukraine would provoke conflict with Russia. I have also written poems and novels on IR theory, plus two novels based on my experiences in China during the tumultuous years of 1988-89 and in France during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I like this book because Cohen writes about what happened and what could have happened―if Washington had chosen alternative foreign policies in its relations with the former Soviet Union and Russia. As I argued in Surviving the Millennium, this kind of approach is not “counter-factual” because it explores realistic policy alternatives made at the time that represent the paths not taken.
But sometimes, those alternative paths are actually implemented later in new circumstances, so they are part of the historical record and not “counter” the facts. I believe Cohen is right: The US lost a number of opportunities that could have brought Washington and Moscow into a more positive relationship that would have reduced tensions during the Cold War―and now in preventing the present “second” Cold War.
In this wide-ranging and acclaimed book, Stephen F. Cohen challenges conventional wisdom about the course of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Reexamining leaders from Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin's preeminent opponent, and Nikita Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev and his rival Yegor Ligachev, Cohen shows that their defeated policies were viable alternatives and that their tragic personal fates shaped the Soviet Union and Russia today. Cohen's ramifying arguments include that Stalinism was not the predetermined outcome of the Communist Revolution; that the Soviet Union was reformable and its breakup avoidable; and that the opportunity for a real post-Cold War relationship with Russia was squandered…
Almost Home is a fictional retelling of the last great tragedy of the Civil War.
In late April 1865, almost 2,000 newly freed Union prisoners of war are packed onto the steamer Sultana, in poor repair and with a listed capacity of 376 passengers. Among them are four Indiana soldiers…
In the early days of my PhD degree at King’s College London, my research focused very much on developing a Marxist theory of International Relations. From this, I have learned invaluable knowledge that informs my post-PhD writings. These focus more on the study of US-China relations in the context of a changing world order. I have always been passionate about these subjects in so far as they allow me to make sense of the big picture.
There is a consensus among Western elites that the post-Cold War order is over and that a new order is emerging. Richard Sakwa’s book, with an intellectually rich yet accessible writing style, helps readers understand how, in only three decades–nothing in the whole history of the world and a short time from an international order perspective–we have moved from the announcement of the end of history and a new world order to the unraveling of it.
Sakwa argues that the years following the end of the Cold War did not represent a lasting accord between great powers and that the causes of these have to be found in the underlining intolerance of the West’s ideology of “democratic internationalism.”
This meant that after the Cold War there simply was a tactical pause that eventually ushered in the ‘Second Cold War’ we currently find ourselves in. Sakwa wrote a courageous account of…
The end of the Cold War was an opportunity-our inability to seize it has led to today's renewed era of great power competition
"An eloquent and persuasive argument about how the world squandered the promise of the end of the Cold War."-Maria Lipman, Foreign Affairs
The year 1989 heralded a unique prospect for an enduring global peace as harsh ideological divisions and conflicts began to be resolved. Now, three decades on, that peace has been lost. With war in Ukraine and increasing tensions between China, Russia, and the West, great power politics once again dominates the world stage.…
For 30 years, my books, articles, and talks have warned the U.S. failure/refusal to work with Russia and the Europeans to forge a new system of global security after the Cold War could provoke a Russian nationalist backlash, a war between Moscow and Kyiv, and possibly major power conflict. My bookWorld War Trump warned that Trump could stage a coup. Toward an Alternative Transatlantic Strategy warned Biden’s support for Ukraine would provoke conflict with Russia. I have also written poems and novels on IR theory, plus two novels based on my experiences in China during the tumultuous years of 1988-89 and in France during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gilbert Achcar has written one of the most complete recent studies from a global geostrategic and political-economic perspective. It explains the genesis of the “Second” Cold War between the US, Russia, and China, which stemmed in large part from the NATO air war “over” Kosovo with Serbia in 1999, which alienated both Moscow and Beijing.
Much as I have likewise warned in my later books, a major power war could be provoked by the Ukraine-Russia war since 2022 or by perceived Chinese threats to unify with Taiwan, among other conflicts―if diplomacy cannot achieve peace.
A leading international relations expert uncovers the key stages that led from the end of the Cold War to the War in Ukraine.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, warnings of a new Cold War proliferated. In fact, argues Gilbert Achcar in this timely new account, the New Cold War has been ongoing since the late 1990s.
Racing to solidify its position as the last remaining superpower, the US alienated Russia and China, pushing them closer and rebooting the ‘old’ Cold War with disastrous implications. Vladimir Putin’s consequent rise and imperialist reinvention, along with Xi Jinping’s own ascendancy…
For decades, I have sought to understand how and why people stay committed to social justice over the long haul. During the 1960s and ‘70s, I was a journalist covering education, anti-poverty efforts, and public affairs mainly in Georgia and Maryland. I had a stint in government as a gubernatorial press secretary and speechwriter in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the mid 1980s, I joined the Reflective Leadership Center at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, and have taught and written about leadership ever since. I have helped groups in the US, Britain, Poland, Ukraine, New Zealand and Australia develop their own leadership in a variety of fields.
William Ury is widely appreciated for collaborating with Roger Fisher to offer effective conflict resolution guidance (see Getting to Yes). I have long taught their concepts and methods in my leadership courses. This book is a culmination of Ury’s incredible career of helping groups resolve an array of conflicts, including the most intractable (in Columbia, for example).
Ury describes himself as a “possibilist” who believes the most daunting conflicts can be sustainably resolved via three “victories”–getting on the balcony to more fully understand the perspectives of the warring parties, building a bridge among the parties, and engaging more neutral stakeholders.
This book lifts my spirits at a time when some powerful individuals and groups are operating from a win-lose, zero-sum mentality that too easily devolves into a lose-lose for all. I vote with Ury for a transformational, win-win mentality.
The author of the world's best-selling book on negotiation draws on his nearly fifty years of experience and knowledge grappling with the world's toughest conflicts to offer a way out of the seemingly impossible problems of our time.
Conflict is increasing everywhere, threatening everything we hold dear-from our families to our democracy, from our workplaces to our world. In nearly every area of society, we are fighting more and collaborating less, especially over crucial problems that demand solutions.
With this groundbreaking book, bestselling author and international negotiator William Ury shares a new "path to possible"-time-tested practices that will help…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
by
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
I’m a historian and professor in Louisiana, in the southern United States. When I was an undergraduate in college (many years ago!), I embraced the opportunity to study diverse subjects, ranging from the natural sciences to the humanities. I became fascinated by medicine and health and their relationship to history, society, and international relations–and have remained fascinated ever since. These interests led me to study humanitarianism and its place in 20th-century US foreign relations and international history. Over the years, I have researched and written two books and more than 20 articles on these subjects, and I love sharing this history with readers and students alike.
Even after Europe’s colonies became independent, this book reveals earlier political hierarchies were preserved through a surprising channel: the United Nations and its peacekeeping forces.
I loved this book for multiple reasons, but above all, because it shows how practices we consider “humanitarian,” in fact, perpetuated power imbalances between former empires and their former colonies. It also helped me to think about the United Nations and its global role in new ways. Perhaps most importantly, it changed my understanding of international peacekeeping, showing that its history was often more violent than the name might imply.
While focused on the decades after World War II, this book also helps readers understand the political challenges with global peacekeeping operations today.
This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945-1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how…
