James Verini
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
James Verini’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So it gets back to your question from before about focusing on civilians as opposed to soldiers.
In part, that choice was forced on me as a journalist in Ukraine.
It wasn't like Iraq, where I got to embed constantly with soldiers or in other conflicts I covered.
But it ended up being a really good thing, and it ended up being how I got to this book, because it forced me to just spend a lot of time with civilians who were caught in this war, who, again, that is the experience that most of us would have in war.
And with my first book, the book about the Battle of Mosul, it's a pretty violent and grim book.
Michael Hare, in his wonderful book Dispatches about Vietnam, said that eventually the war came down to men hunting men.
And that's what my first book was about.
It was men hunting men.
And I wanted to see with this book if I couldn't
find another way of talking about war about how war affects not the combatants but everyone else because the vast majority of people affected in most wars are civilians they're not combatants and i wanted um i wanted to study that i wanted to put the reader as much as as far as i could into the experience of ordinary um people living through this war and and more than that i wanted to
do a war story that wasn't really about war if you like this is not about people trying to kill people uh this book this book is about people in the midst of a war helping one another um not to sound schmaltzy about it but in in war it's often said you see the best and worst in in people and that really is true this book is largely about people doing their best for one another
um helping one another saving one another's lives um and in that sense it was it was
A real pleasure to write.
You know, of course, it was deeply saddening.
And I, you know, I was often brought to tears and speechlessness interviewing these people when I found them around Ukraine and Europe, the survivors.
But the fact that I got to describe, you used the word heroism before.
A lot of these people, like Olena Matushin and Serhii in Lithuania, who created the shelter,
These are people who didn't ask to be heroes.
Heroism was forced upon them by this war.
And when it presented itself to many of them, it wasn't even a choice.
Showing 121–140 of 216 · page 7 of 11
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