ARC Review - The War Came to Us

Author

Steve's Book Stuff
July 06, 2023

Christopher Miller first went to Ukraine as a Peace Corp volunteer in 2010, when he worked as a schoolteacher in Artemivsk (now called Bakhmut). Over his time there he slowly fell in love with the place. He has spent the bulk of his working career ever since in Ukraine. After leaving the Peace Corp he found work in Ukraine as a reporter and watched and reported as history unfolded around him.

At the time he joined the Peace Corp Miller had “decided to get lost for a while”. He had been working in Portland, Oregon as a local reporter. But news reporting was undergoing big changes in the US, and finding work was getting harder to do. While he was in Ukraine teaching with the Peace Corp the reporting bug never left him. He began to spend some of his non-teaching time with a group of Ukrainian investigative reporters.

After leaving the Peace Corp he got a job with the Kyiv Post, the first of many in-country reporting assignments. He has filed reports as a stringer for the New York Times, Washington Post, the Independent and other news organizations. For a while he was part of the staff reporting from Ukraine for Buzzfeed News. Now he works for the Financial Times.

Miller’s new book The War Came to Us, is both the story of his time in Ukraine, and an on the ground reporting of the events that have shaped Ukraine over the last decade. Miller was there, reporting from the Euromaidan in 2014 when the Ukranian revolution removed the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych from power. He was there when the “little green men” invaded and took over Crimea and much of the Donbas. He has been there for many of the major events that have made headline news around the world and continues reporting from Ukraine right up to today.

Miller’s love for the country and its people comes through clearly in this book. There are plenty of places you can go if you want to read about military strategies or political histories of Russia and Ukraine that have led to the current war. That is not what you get with this book.

Miller shows us lots of little moments that help to convey why he feels the way he does. Starting with his time in the country before the war, right up to and through the Russian invasion, his focus in relating stories to us is almost always on ordinary people - how events are impacting them, and how they are impacting events. It’s through their stories that you come to understand what’s going on in Ukraine and why it means so much.

If you are looking for an authoritative overview of the conflict in Ukraine, you could not ask for a better book. I highly recommend this one.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTE: I read an advanced review copy of the book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher Bloomsbury USA. The book will be released to the public on Tuesday, July 18, 2023.

Steve's Book Stuff participates in affiliate programs for the booksellers asterisked below. Purchases you make through an affiliate link will return a small commission to me, at no additional cost to you.

Borrow or Purchase The War Came to Us here:

📗 Support Indie Bookstores: Buy this book directly from Bookshop.org*.

📚 Visit my Bookshop.org shop to see all my reviewed books.

Title: The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine

Author: Christopher Miller

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Publish Date: Jul 18, 2023

ISBN-13: 9781399406857

Publisher’s List Price: $25.20

Reply

or to participate.