Yaroslav Trofimov’s name will be familiar to anyone who has read the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the war in Ukraine. Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent for the Journal, whose on-the-ground dispatches from Ukraine were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He was born and raised in Kyiv, where he was reporting when Putin launched his February 24, 2022, assault. In Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence (Penguin Press, 400 pp., $32), he recalls wondering on that day whether the city would meet the same fate as Kabul had the summer before. He had witnessed the American-trained Afghan National Army dissolve in the face of the Taliban’s onslaught. To the surprise of many, in the Kremlin and in the West, the Ukrainian army did not crumble. Trofimov’s book is a comprehensive account of the startling and heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people during the first year of the conflict (an epilogue briefly touches on the beginning of the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive and the Prigozhin mutiny). It also catalogues, in a quietly devastating way, the sheer human cost of the war. Trofimov’s title expresses the persistent hope of Ukrainians that, in the words of their national anthem, “Our enemies will vanish, / Like dew at sunrise, / And we, oh brothers, will become the masters once again / Of our own land.”
In his engrossing study They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale, 512 pp., $35), Carlos Eire deals with what he calls, after William James, “wild facts” — or, put another way, miracles or apparently supernatural occurrences for which we nonetheless have many credible eyewitness accounts. His subject matter is the seemingly impossible phenomena of levitation (floating above the ground) and bilocation (being present in two places at once), in particular in the early modern period, when, he notes, the rational-scientific worldview — Newtonian physics, Sir Francis Bacon’s empiricism — was paradoxically on the ascent. Eire, a professor at Yale, is well aware that giving serious historical attention to what he admits is “strange stuff, for sure,” runs against the grain of much of modern scholarship, and he cautions that he will raise more questions than he can answer. His book examines the well-attested cases of three Catholic mystics who levitated, bilocated, or did both (Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Joseph of Cupertino, and a somewhat less known Spanish nun, María de Ágreda). Then it turns to frauds, demoniacs, and witches. (“The devil played one hell of a role in the birth of modernity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that era also known as the Age of Reason,” he comments.) He wants to show that true objectivity requires being skeptical about “strictly materialist interpretations” of events — that “modern-day unbelief is, in fact, a form of belief.”
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