Pieniazek, Pawel. Translated by Malgorzata Markoff and John Markoff. Greetings from Novorossiya: Eyewitness to the War in Ukraine. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.
Polish journalist Pawel Pieniazek was among the first journalists to enter the war-torn region of eastern Ukraine and Greetings from Novorossiya is his vivid firsthand account of the conflict. He was the first reporter to reach the scene when Russian troops in Ukraine accidentally shot down a civilian airliner, killing all 298 people aboard. Unlike Western journalists, his fluency in both Ukrainian and Russian granted him access and the ability to move among all sides in the conflict. With powerful color photos, telling interviews from the local population, and brilliant reportage, Pieniazek’s account documents these dramatic events as they transpired.

Kuzio, Taras. Putin's War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.
Putin’s war against Ukraine has killed over 30,000 civilians, Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and Russian proxies, forced a third of the population of the Donbas to flee, illegally nationalized Ukrainian state and private entities in the Crimea and the Donbas, destroyed huge areas of the infrastructure and economy of the Donbas, and created a black hole of crime and soft security threats to Europe. Putin's War Against Ukraine is the first book to focus on national identity as the root of the crisis through Russia's long-term refusal to view Ukrainians as a separate people and an unwillingness to recognize the sovereignty and borders of independent Ukraine.

De Toledo, Sylvie, and Deborah Edler Brown. Grandparents as Parents, Second Edition: A Survival Guide for Raising a Second Family. Guilford Press, 2013.
If you're among the millions of grandparents raising grandchildren today, you need information, support, and practical guidance you can count on to keep your family strong. This is the book for you. Learn effective strategies to help you cope with the stresses of parenting the second time around, care for vulnerable grand kids and set boundaries with their often-troubled parents, and navigate the maze of government aid, court proceedings, and special education. Wise, honest, moving stories show how numerous other grandparents are surviving and thriving in their new roles.

Scheeringa, Michael S. They'll Never Be the Same: A Parent's Guide to PTSD in Youth. Las Vegas Central Recovery Press, 2018.
A compassionate and accessible guide for parents whose children have experienced traumatic or life-threatening events written by one of the foremost authorities on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children and adolescents. Dr. Scheeringa understands the desperation many parents feel and explains the impact of trauma, simplifies the science into layman’s terms, debunks the myths, and provides direction on navigating the confusing maze of the mental health world to find appropriate care.

Shore, Marci. The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. Yale University Press, 2018.
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.

Toal, Gerard. Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus. Oxford University Press, 2017.
In Near Abroad, Gerard Toal moves beyond the polemical rhetoric that surrounds Russia's interventions in Georgia and Ukraine to study the underlying territorial conflicts and geopolitical struggles. Central to understanding are legacies of the Soviet Union collapse: unresolved territorial issues, weak states and a conflicted geopolitical culture in Russia over the new territorial order. Toal explains the road to invasion and war in Georgia and Ukraine, thereafter, and provides an account of real life geopolitics, one that emphasizes changing spatial relationships, geopolitical cultures and the power of media images. Not only a penetrating analysis of Russia's relationships with its regional neighbors, Near Abroad also offers an analysis of how US geopolitical culture frequently fails to fully understand Russia and the geopolitical archipelago of dependencies in its near abroad.

Zhadan, Serhiy. Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler. Voroshilovgrad. Deep Vellum Publishing, 2016.
A city-dwelling advertising executive heads home to take over his brother’s gas station after he mysteriously disappears, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. The industrial landscape of now-war-torn eastern Ukraine sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, mixing magical realism and exhilarating road novel in the poetic, expressive prose that marks Ukrainian literary rockstar Serhiy Zhadan’s vivacious style.

Zhadan, Serhiy. Mesopotamia. Yale University Press, 2018.
This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post-independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Słoniowska, Żanna. The House with the Stained-Glass Window. MacLehose Press, 2017.
In 1989, Marianna, the beautiful star soprano at the Lviv opera, is shot dead in the street as she leads the Ukrainian citizens in their protest against Soviet power. Only eleven years old at the time, her daughter tells the story of their family before and after that critical moment - including, ten years later, her own passionate affair with an older, married man. Just like their home city of Lviv, which stands at the crossroads of nations and cultures, the women in this family have had turbulent lives, scarred by war and political turmoil, but also by their own inability to show each other their feelings. Lyrically told, this is the story of a young girl's emotional, sexual, artistic and political awakening as she matures under the influence of her relatives, her mother's former lover, her city and its fortunes.

Grossman, Vasily. Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler and Anna Aslanyan. Everything Flows. NYRB Classics, 2009.
Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed his masterpiece, Life and Fate. The main story is simple: released after thirty years in the Soviet camps, Ivan Grigoryevich must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world.

Doerr Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. Scribner, 2014.
Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner. Riverhead Books, 2003.
The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Damo, Duane. Growing Up in the Civil War: 1861 to 1865. Lerner Publishing Group, 2002.
Growing up during the Civil War, children such as fourteen-year-old Theodore Upson and sixteen-year-old Emma Sansom did more than just watch from the sidelines, they fought to try to preserve their way of life. Whether on the battlefields, in the factories, on plantations, or at home, children such as Willis Cozart, a young slave, faced the realities of war including food shortages, a ravaged countryside, and most tragically, the death of family members.

Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition. Edited by Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Translated by Susan Massotty. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
The Diary of a Young Girl is the record of two years in the life of a remarkable Jewish girl whose triumphant humanity in the face of unfathomable deprivation and fear has made the book one of the most enduring documents of our time.

Raatma, Lucia. Grandmothers are Part of a Family. Capstone Press, 2018.
There are many different names for a grandmother. But no matter what you call her, a grandma is a constant source of love and smiles. Beautiful photos and simple text are combined with extensive back matter.

Toll, Nellie. Behind the Secret Window: A Memoir of a Hidden Childhood During World War Two.1993. Puffin Books, 2003.
Illustrated with Nelly’s original watercolors, this powerful memoir tells the true story of how a little girl’s imagination helped her survive World War II. The Nazis come to Poland when Nelly is six. By the time she turns eight, the events of World War II have taken almost everyone she loves. Scared, lonely, and running from the Nazis, Nelly hides in the bedroom of a Gentile couple in Lwow, Poland. For over a year, she lives in fear of discovery, writing in her diary and painting pictures of a fantasy world filled with open skies and happy families.

Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Ironweed Press, 1999.
First published in 1895, this small masterpiece set the pattern for the treatment of war in modern fiction. The novel is told through the eyes of Henry Fleming, a young soldier caught up in an unnamed Civil War battle who is motivated not by the unselfish heroism of conventional war stories, but by fear, cowardice, and finally, egotism. However, in his struggle to find reality amid the nightmarish chaos of war, the young soldier also discovers courage, humility, and perhaps, wisdom. Although Crane had never been in battle before writing The Red Badge of Courage, the book was widely praised by experienced soldiers for its uncanny re-creation of the sights, sounds, and sense of actual combat.

Filipovic, Zlata. Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo.Penguin Books Ltd., 1994.
When Zlata’s Diary was first published at the height of the Bosnian conflict, it became an international bestseller and was compared to The Diary of Anne Frank, both for the freshness of its voice and the grimness of the world it describes. It begins as the day-to-day record of the life of a typical eleven-year-old girl, preoccupied by piano lessons and birthday parties. But as war engulfs Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovic becomes a witness to food shortages and the deaths of friends and learns to wait out bombardments in a neighbor’s cellar. Yet throughout she remains courageous and observant. The result is a book that has the power to move and instruct readers a world away.

Gratz, Alan. Grenade.Scholastic Press, 2018.
It's 1945, and the world is in the grip of war. Hideki lives on Okinawa, an island near Japan. When he is drafted to fight for the Japanese army, he is handed a grenade and told: Don't come back until you've killed an American soldier. Ray, a young American Marine, has just landed on Okinawa. This is Ray's first-ever battle, and all he knows is that the enemy is everywhere. Hideki and Ray each fight their way across the island, surviving heart-pounding clashes and dangerous attacks. But when the two of them collide in the middle of the battle, the choices they make in that single instant will change everything.

Williams, Mary. Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan.Lee & Low Books, 2005.
Eight-year-old Garang, orphaned by a civil war in Sudan, finds the inner strength to help lead other boys as they trek hundreds of miles seeking safety in Ethiopia, then Kenya, and finally in the United States.