The University of Toronto Press catalogue was waiting for me in my mailbox after the break. It tells us of several books forthcoming in 2016 that will be of interest to Ukrainian and Russian Christians especially, inter alia, and to those trying to understand the history of the current Russian war against Ukraine, and Ukraine's own recent history.
It also drew my attention to a wide-ranging study released last summer: Margarita Balmaceda,
Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (U of T Press, 2015),464pp.
The publisher tells us this about the book:
Energy has been an important element in
Moscow’s quest to exert power and influence in its surrounding areas
both before and after the collapse of the USSR. With their political
independence in 1991, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania also became,
virtually overnight, separate energy-poor entities heavily dependent on
Russia. This increasingly costly dependency – and elites’ scrambling
over associated profits – came to crucially affect not only relations
with Russia, but the very nature of post-independence state building.
The Politics of Energy Dependency
explores why these states were unable to move towards energy
diversification. Through extensive field research using previously
untapped local-language sources, Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals a
complex picture of local elites dealing with the complications of energy
dependency and, in the process, affecting the energy security of Europe
as a whole.
A must-read for anyone interested in Eastern Europe,
Russia, and the politics of natural resources, this book reveals the
insights gained by looking at post-Soviet development and international
relations issues not only from a Moscow-centered perspective, but from
that of individual actors in other states.
Set for release in March is George Liber's study,
Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954 (U of T Press, 2016), 416pp.
About this book we are told:
Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking
territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million “excess
deaths” as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced
population transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of
the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and
purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century
and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and
crafted new identities.
In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954,
George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars
and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East
Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and
forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine’s boundaries,
institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population
according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social
ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the
Holocaust played critical roles in forming today’s Ukraine.
A
landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of
mass violence in Europe’s bloodlands, Liber’s book will transform our
understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany,
and East Central Europe in the twentieth century.
Also set for release this year is a collection sure to be of interest to Canada's very considerable Ukrainian community: Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski,
Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home (U of T Press, 2016), 160pp.
About this book we are told:
What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound
challenge the conventions of genre – memoir, fiction, poetry,
biography, essay – and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial
identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These
intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant
creative writing by some of Canada’s best-known Ukrainian Canadian
authors.
To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul
and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian
settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian
literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration
of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the
shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of
ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.
