CANR

CANR

Marlowe, Lara

WORK TITLE: How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying
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PERSONAL

Born 1957, in CA; married, mid-1980s (divorced); married Robert Fisk (a journalist), 1988 (divorced, 2009); naturalized French citizen, 2019.

EDUCATION:

University of California, Los Angeles, B.A.; attended Sorbonne University; Oxford University, master’s degree.

ADDRESS

  • Home - Paris, France; Dublin, Ireland.

CAREER

Journalist, writer. 60 Minutes, CBS, associate producer; Financial Times, contributor; Time, journalist, rose to Beirut bureau chief, 1981-96; Irish Times, foreign correspondent, including from Washington, D.C., and Paris, France, 1996-2023, columnist, 2023–.

AWARDS:

Has won four journalism awards; Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, 2006.

WRITINGS

  • The Things I've Seen: Nine Lives of a Foreign Correspondent, Dufour Editions (Chester Springs, PA), 2010
  • Painted with Words, Liberties Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2012
  • Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2021
  • How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine, Melville House (Brooklyn, NY), 2025

SIDELIGHTS

[open new]Lara Marlowe is a seasoned international journalist who has become acquainted with war zones, navigated the nuances of global politics, and written volumes about her experiences. She was born and raised in California and majored in French at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and went on to earn a graduate degree in international relations at England’s Oxford University. She worked for Time magazine for fifteen years, culminating in a stint as bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon. She resigned from her post in Beirut on principle in the wake of the massacre near Qana in 1996, when the occupying Israeli army fired shells at a U.N. compound where Lebanese civilians were sheltering, killing over one hundred and wounding as many more. Marlow’s editors were pro-Israeli and would not allow substantial criticism of Israel to be published. Becoming a contributor to the Irish Times in 2009, Marlowe served as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Paris, whence she reported on European as well as Middle Eastern affairs.

Marlowe first became acquainted with Paris’s allure at age five when her mother returned to their Southern California home after an overseas trip with gifts of a miniature Eiffel Tower and a scarf emblazoned with monuments. She took her first French lessons at age seven. Moving to Paris half a dozen times over the course of her adulthood, Marlowe felt so fully at home that she began the naturalization process in 2003 and finally became a citizen in 2019. Meanwhile she also lived in Dublin, Ireland.

Concerning her cosmopolitan identity, Marlowe explained to Orna Mulcahy of the Gloss: “I am a distillation of European emigration to the US, including an Irish great grandmother called Callie Hurney. My ancestors kept moving until they reached California, which is where I grew up. But those roots have become distended as I’ve advanced in life. I set down new roots, in France and Ireland, and in the Middle Eastern countries where I lived and worked. People take me for a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the US. I feel foreign everywhere. I suspect that is a good thing for an aspiring writer.”

Marlow’s first book, The Things I’ve Seen: Nine Lives of a Foreign Correspondent, published in 2010, details her activities as a journalist over the preceding three decades. By then she had served in war-torn and revolt-wracked nations including Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, Algeria, Yugoslavia, and Palestine. She first traveled to Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991 and returned frequently through the 1990s, the 2003 Iraq War, and beyond. Marlow’s husband of two decades, Robert Fisk, was himself a decorated British journalist who specialized in Middle Eastern affairs. They first met in Damascus, Syria, in 1983; after Marlowe briefly wed another, she and Fisk married in 1988. Following his untimely death in 2020, she commemorated their partnership as well as his life’s work in Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk.

Marlowe braved one of the most unstable regions of the twenty-first century to write about a Ukrainian woman serving on the front lines in the full-blown war started by Russia’s invasion of 2022. Russia had illegally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014. Yulia Mykytenko originally joined the army in 2016 to be with her husband, Ilia Serbin, who was killed by Russian bombardment in 2018. Her father, protesting apparent capitulation to Russia, died of self-immolation in Kyiv in 2020. Marlowe was inspired to write a book when she learned that in Ukraine’s dire straits, some 60,000 women were serving in the military, including 10,000 in combat positions. When she approached Ukrainian authorities, they put her in touch with several women in the service, and Mykytenko’s story stood out.

How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine opens with Yulia, who has just withdrawn from the military, responding to the 2022 invasion by heading back to the local recruitment center. When she first joined the military half a decade earlier, she was relegated to administrative and accounting work. At age twenty-one, her insistence led to her first posting on guard duty, and soon her university degree enabled her to become head of a reconnaissance unit. Of the 20 men in her unit, 16 promptly resigned, refusing to be commanded by a woman—but several rejoined after hearing of her competence. As lieutenant and platoon commander, Mykytenko took responsibility for tasks including the collection of soldiers’ corpses, communicating with their families, and conducting drone reconnaissance of battle sites. On occasion, five-hundred-dollar first-person-view drones piloted by Mykytenko and her platoon members wreck tanks worth millions. Mykytenko is not shy in voicing her political opinions, condemning President Zelenskyy because he responded weakly to the seizure of Crimea and dismissed the possibility of a Russian invasion, despite intelligence warnings in 2021, leaving Ukraine’s military underprepared and the nation vulnerable. The title of Marlow’s book is taken from a poem by dissident Ukrainian author Vasyl Stus, who perished in 1985 in a Soviet labor camp.

Admiring the “war-weary but indomitable” Mykytenko, a Kirkus Reviews writer hailed Marlowe’s book as a “wartime account of searing intensity and righteous anger.” In Booklist, James Pekoll affirmed that Marlowe provides both a comprehensive treatment of the war and a moving testament to the “indefatigable courage” of Ukraine’s soldiers. Pekoll praised How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying as a “tour de force of hope and service amid the destruction of a horrific, ongoing war.”[close new]

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

  • Booklist, December, 2024, James Pekoll, review of How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine, p. 101.

  • Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2024, review of How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying.

ONLINE

  • France Ireland Chamber of Commerce website, https://www.franceireland.ie/ (May 20, 2025), author profile.

  • Gloss, https://thegloss.ie/ (May 20, 2025), Orna Mulcahy, “Writer’s Block with Lara Marlowe.”

  • Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (April 12, 2019), Lara Marlowe, “After the Longest Journey of My Life, I Am Now a French Citizen”; (May 20, 2025), author profile.

  • MediaBite, http://www.mediabite.org/ (June 28, 2008), “Route Irish Times–Part 1: An Interview with Lara Marlowe, Foreign Correspondent for the Irish Times.”

  • NPR website, https://www.npr.org/ (February 5, 2025), Leila Fadel, “Journalist Lara Marlowe Discusses Her Book ‘How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying.'”

  • The Things I've Seen: Nine Lives of a Foreign Correspondent Dufour Editions (Chester Springs, PA), 2010
  • Painted with Words Liberties Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2012
  • Love in a Time of War: My Years with Robert Fisk Head of Zeus (London, England), 2021
  • How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine Melville House (Brooklyn, NY), 2025
1. How good it is I have no fear of dying : Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine LCCN 2024945918 Type of material Book Personal name Marlowe, Lara, author. Main title How good it is I have no fear of dying : Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine / Lara Marlowe. Published/Produced Brooklyn : Melville House, 2025. Projected pub date 2502 Description pages cm ISBN 9781685891879 (trade paperback) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Love in a time of war : my years with Robert Fisk LCCN 2020479964 Type of material Book Personal name Marlowe, Lara, author. Main title Love in a time of war : my years with Robert Fisk / Lara Marlowe. Published/Produced London : Head of Zeus Ltd, 2021. Description 440 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781801102513 (hbk.) 1801102511 CALL NUMBER PN4784.F6 M27 2021 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Painted with words LCCN 2012398387 Type of material Book Personal name Marlowe, Lara. Main title Painted with words / Lara Marlowe. Published/Created Dublin : Liberties Press, 2012. Description 280 p. : col. ill. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9781907593369 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER N7475 .M375 2012 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. The things I've seen : nine lives of a foreign correspondent LCCN 2011379058 Type of material Book Personal name Marlowe, Lara. Main title The things I've seen : nine lives of a foreign correspondent / Lara Marlowe. Published/Created Dublin : Liberties ; Chester Springs, Pa. : Distributed in the United States by Dufour Editions, 2010. Description 350 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781907593048 (pbk.) 1907593047 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER PN5146.M35 A3 2010 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE
  • Irish Times - https://www.irishtimes.com/author/lara-marlowe/

    Lara Marlowe
    Contributor
    Lara Marlowe is an Irish Times contributor and former Paris and Washington correspondent.

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    Lara Marlowe

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    This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous.
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    Lara Marlowe
    Born 25 April 1957 (age 68)
    California, United States
    Nationality American, French
    Education UCLA, Sorbonne, Oxford
    Occupation Journalist
    Years active 1981–present
    Notable credit(s) War correspondent (most recently Iraq War, Afghanistan, 2006 Lebanon War); Beirut Bureau chief – Time (1981–1996); Middle East correspondent – The Irish Times (1996–2009); US correspondent – The Irish Times (2009–2012), Books: The Things I've Seen (2010), Painted with Words (2011)
    Spouse Robert Fisk (1994–2006)
    Lara Marlowe (born 25 April 1957) is a US-born journalist and author, who was the US correspondent for The Irish Times (2009–2012) before returning to Paris in 2013 as the paper's Paris correspondent. Marlowe also spent 15 years as a journalist for Time. She was married to Robert Fisk for 12 years.[1]

    On April 11, 2019, Marlowe became a naturalized French citizen.[2]

    Career
    Born in California, Marlowe received a B.A. in French from UCLA and a Master's in International Relations from Oxford University; she also spent a year of study at the Sorbonne. She became a correspondent for The Irish Times in 1996, after resigning, in the wake of the Qana massacre, from Time, where she was Beirut bureau chief, in protest at the reluctance of its editors to print anything critical of Israel.[3]

    She regularly reported from Iraq following the 2003 US-led invasion thereof. She has been a guest contributor to many broadcast and print outlets. Marlowe is a leading journalist on the Middle East as well as domestic French politics. For her work, she was made Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 2006.[4] She is a regular contributor to Newstalk in Ireland.

    While based in Washington D.C. for The Irish Times, Marlowe traveled twice to Haiti reporting on the immediate aftermath of its catastrophic earthquake in January 2010, and again in July 2010.

    Marlowe has written three books: The Things I've Seen (2010), Painted with Words (2011) and Love in a Time of War (2021). The last book is a memoir of the period she worked with Fisk.

  • Morning Edition - https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/nx-s1-5117796/journalist-lara-marlowe-discusses-her-book-how-good-it-is-i-have-no-fear-of-dying

    Journalist Lara Marlowe discusses her book 'How Good It Is I Have No Fear Of Dying'
    February 5, 20254:19 AM ET
    Heard on Morning Edition
    Leila Fadel, photographed for NPR, 2 May 2022, in Washington DC. Photo by Mike Morgan for NPR.
    Leila Fadel

    6-Minute Listen
    Transcript
    NPR speaks with journalist Lara Marlowe about her book documenting the life of 29-year-old Yulia Mykytenko, a female lieutenant leading a unit on the front lines of the war against Russia in Ukraine.

    Sponsor Message

    LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: On the day I'm supposed to speak to Lara Marlowe and the Ukrainian soldier she profiles in her new book, Lt. Yulia Mykytenko can't make the interview.

    LARA MARLOWE: She says, I must warn you that a great possibility that I won't be able to join this time. We have a massive assault all over the front line, and I need to be online and on the phone.

    FADEL: Marlowe is used to it. She spent months chronicling 29-year-old Yulia's life in a first-person account of what it's like to be a Ukrainian woman leading a unit fighting Russian forces in her homeland. Sometimes Yulia would have to miss meetings to pick up dead bodies of her comrades, inform their families of the deaths or do drone reconnaissance of a battle. Her life on the front lines is the story Marlowe tells in "How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying."

    MARLOWE: I wanted to write about women in the Ukrainian army because I had read that there were 60,000 of them, of whom about 10,000 are in combat positions. They put me in touch with several women. But the one who really, really impressed me was Yulia Mykytenko. I started by putting my foot in, and I said, are you the lady drone operator? And she said, I am the commander of a platoon, of a reconnaissance platoon. And I said, oh, sorry, sorry (laughter). And so gradually, over about an hour, her whole life story came out - how she had joined the army to be with Ilia Serbin, how he was killed in a Russian bombardment, how she stayed in the army. Her father self-immolated on the Maidan in 2020 because he thought that Zelenskyy was capitulating to Russia. So she's known a terrible tragedy. And yet she seemed very calm, just a really lovely person.

    FADEL: I think people often forget that the full-scale invasion in 2022 was not the beginning of this war, that Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, that Yulia fought before...

    MARLOWE: Yes.

    FADEL: ...And her husband was killed, as you write in the book, in 2018, and her father made that protest before the full-scale invasion.

    MARLOWE: Yes.

    FADEL: You open the book - she's gotten out of the military, and she's kind of trying to figure out what to do with her life. And the full-scale invasion begins, and she goes right to that recruitment center. And I thought it was so telling the way people kind of dismissed her, right?

    MARLOWE: Uh-huh.

    FADEL: And everybody's getting a gun. Everybody's getting recruited, and she just sleeps there until she joins the territorial defense. If you could, just tell us about her military career, the challenges she's faced as a woman and the way she led the way for other women to join the front lines in Ukraine.

    MARLOWE: Well, she joined in 2016. Initially, she was assigned to admin work. She was a secretary and accountant. And she was furious, and so she started complaining, saying, I am a loyal citizen of Ukraine. I joined the army as a volunteer. I should stand guard duty like every man. And eventually, one morning, her name was on the roster for guard duty, and that was a small triumph for her. She was 21 years old then. And then she found out that, since she had a university degree, she could become a commissioned officer. And her commanding officer said, would you like to head this reconnaissance unit? And she said yes. And when she became the lieutenant in charge of the reconnaissance unit, 16 out of 20 men in the unit transferred out. They did not want to be under a woman's orders. She was devastated, but she kept her unit running with just four men. But several of them did return to the unit because word went round that she was actually a very good commander.

    FADEL: You know, I was thinking about this, too, as I read her experience because it starts with the first booms of the full-scale invasion beginning. And in 2025, I'm reading it at a time when U.S. support for this war is in question. How does Yulia feel about the incoming administration and other Ukrainian soldiers feel about the incoming administration and what this might mean for Ukraine's war?

    MARLOWE: She's obviously very, very interested, and they've been talking about it certainly since November. They had become very disillusioned with the Biden administration because she had told me it was like "Groundhog Day." Nothing would change. But I think that they probably trust Trump a little bit more than I would. They really have very high hopes in him that he will not betray them.

    FADEL: Can I ask why they have this trust? I mean, because a lot of the president's supporters really wanted the U.S. to stop spending any money on Ukraine and this war and to get out of it. So what makes them hope?

    MARLOWE: I think if you're under fire day after day, if you're getting shelled and somebody says, I'm going to put an end to this, I think you want to believe them.

    FADEL: You know, it was interesting reading your book in this moment in the U.S. when, you know, women's role in the military is being questioned. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, in the past said women shouldn't serve in combat roles in the U.S. military. He's since walked that back - has said, as long as they meet standards. What does Yulia's story say about women in combat?

    MARLOWE: I read Pete Hegseth's quote to her, and she laughed, and she said, that's just what - that's exactly like the post-Soviet generals in Ukraine because, you know, the older military brass would have served in the Soviet army. And there's a bit of tension between the young officers like Yulia and the old fogies.

    FADEL: You called the book "How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying." Where did this come from - this title?

    MARLOWE: It's the first line of a very famous poem in Ukraine, which was written by a dissident poet called Vasyl Stus, and he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1985. But for me, it really embodies what the book is about because Yulia's husband, Ilia, was not afraid to die. He died for his country. Her father was not afraid to die, and in his way, he died for his country. Yulia is not afraid to die. She really does not have any fear of dying.

    FADEL: Wow.

    MARLOWE: And it's emblematic of the whole country, of everyone in Ukraine who is resisting Russian aggression, who is saying no to occupation, who's saying, we will fight for our independence.

    FADEL: Lara Marlowe is the author of "How Good It Is I Have No Fear Of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight For Ukraine." Thank you so much for your time.

    MARLOWE: Thank you, Leila.

    (SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN & BRIGHT'S "DAYLIGHT (INSTRUMENTAL)")

  • The Gloss - https://thegloss.ie/writers-block-with-lara-marlowe/

    Writer’s Block with Lara Marlowe
    by Orna Mulcahy

    California-born writer, journalist for TIME Magazine and France correspondent for The Irish Times, Lara Marlowe, talks to Orna Mulcahy
    Lara Marlowe is a leading journalist on French politics and life, writing as France correspondent for The Irish Times where she has also worked as US Correspondent. Previously, the California-born writer spent 15 years as a journalist with TIME magazine, rising to the position of Bureau Chief in Beirut. Her 2013 book The Things I’ve Seen draws on her three decades as a foreign correspondent in war-ravaged countries from Afghanistan to Lebanon, to Yugoslavia and the Palestinian territories.

    In 1988, Marlowe married the late Robert Fisk, a hugely influential Middle East journalist who she describes as the finest of his generation. For over a decade they worked together in war zones, surviving encounters with gunmen at checkpoints, sheltering together under bombardment in Beirut, Belgrade and Baghdad. When their marriage ended, Fisk divided his time between Beirut and Dalkey, while Marlowe settled in Paris, perfecting her French and immersing herself in the culture of the city, eventually becoming a French citizen in 2019. In 2006, Marlowe was named a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur for her contribution to Franco-Irish understanding. Marlowe continues to write about all aspects of French cultural and political life, and the things that bind Ireland to La Belle France. According to Marlowe, “Ireland needs France for its elegance, sophistication, perfectionism, wine and cuisine. The Bretons need Ireland as their Celtic mother country, and the rest of France needs Ireland to teach it simplicity, fraternity and the ability to smile through adversity.”

    Marlowe’s feline companion of many years, Spike, died last year at almost 20 years of age. His life and antics had occasionally been mentioned in her Irish Times pieces, one of which was selected as Leaving Certificate English exam text. She has since become the owner of a Russian Blue kitten, Molly, who, like Marlowe, divides her time between Paris and Dublin.

    ON MY NEIGHBOURHOOD I have spent most of the past quarter-century in the seventh arrondissement of Paris. It’s a quiet neighbourhood of government ministries, embassies, museums, 18th-century townhouses and 19th-century apartment buildings. I stop to look at Notre Dame and the Louvre when I take the footbridge across the Seine on early morning walks to the Tuileries. The people I encounter daily – my concierge, neighbours, the newspaper vendor, and shopkeepers – give my elegant district the feel of a friendly village.

    ON HOME Home is where my friends, cat, books, and possessions are. My apartment is filled with carpets, inlaid furniture, mirrors, and lamps that I lugged back from Beirut, Damascus, Marrakech and Tehran. I found other treasures in the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt, and in an antique shop in a village in eastern France where I visit friends several times a year. I can happily spend days at a time without going out, especially in winter. Mentally, the English and French languages are my home.

    ON MY DESK I bought my scratched old walnut desk with brass pulls on the drawers and a leather top at the flea market in Basta, Beirut, in the 1990s. It faces a window looking due west, over the garden of a government ministry. As I write this, the leaves are turning on the six-storey- high chestnut trees. In winter, I’ll see the top of the Eiffel Tower through the bare branches. In spring, I’ll watch the leaves bud, then turn into a wall of green. A painting to the left of my desk, by the father of a close friend, reminds me of my origins. It shows Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty under construction, surrounded by scaffolding and rising up over the rue de Chazelles, where I lived when I landed my first job in Paris after university. To the right of my desk is a cat tree where Molly, my Russian Blue kitten, plays and sleeps while I am working.

    ON ROOTS I am a distillation of European emigration to the US, including an Irish great grandmother called Callie Hurney. My ancestors kept moving until they reached California, which is where I grew up. But those roots have become distended as I’ve advanced in life. I set down new roots, in France and Ireland, and in the middle eastern countries where I lived and worked. People take me for a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the US. I feel foreign everywhere. I suspect that is a good thing for an aspiring writer.

    ON WRITING Thomas Mann said writers were people for whom writing is harder than it is for everyone else. I have always been in awe of “real” writers and would feel pretentious to count myself among them. In fortuitous moments, ideas and phrases rush into my mind in such rapid succession that I race to write them down before they escape me. At other times, I am tormented by the blank page and procrastinate. Michel Déon, who died in Galway five years ago at the age of 97, told me he put off writing not out of fear, but to prolong the anticipation of an act he considered a pleasure to be savoured.

    ON LOVE IN A TIME OF WAR This book, a memoir of my late former husband, the British journalist Robert Fisk, has been the focus of my existence since Robert died unexpectedly on October 30, 2020. The Irish book distributor Simon Hess read a piece that I wrote about Robert in The Irish Times and contacted my agent, Jonathan Williams, and Neil Belton, the Irish publisher at Head of Zeus in London. They asked me to write a book based on that article. I initially declined, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I took three and a half months off work and shipped 50 kilos of archives to Howth, including Robert’s letters and books and my articles and diaries from the years we were together. Robert and I had been divorced for eleven years when he died, but those documents were incredibly evocative. I sorted everything into chronological order and gradually reconstructed 20 years of my life, starting with our first meeting in Damascus in 1983 and our four-year courtship, during which I made the mistake of marrying someone else. I recount living in Beirut with Robert during the last years of the Lebanese civil war and the hostage crisis, reporting trips to revolutionary Iran, the Islamist revolt in Algeria, the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars – all this against the backdrop of our romance and eventual breakup. Despite the sadness, the experience left me with renewed appreciation for Robert’s genius as a journalist, and gratitude for having known him.

    ON WHAT’S NEXT Now that the book is out, I must concentrate on my day job. I look forward to covering the French presidency of the EU, and especially the French presidential election campaign between now and next April. After that, I dream of writing a historical novel, set in 19th-century Paris …

    In conversation with Orna Mulcahy. Love in a Time of War, My Years with Robert Fisk, is published by Head of Zeus, €22.

Marlowe, Lara HOW GOOD IT IS I HAVE NO FEAR OF DYING Melville House (NonFiction None) $29.99 2, 4 ISBN: 9781685891879

An extensive report from the front lines of Ukraine, viewed through the eyes of a war-weary but indomitable officer.Irish Times reporter Marlowe recounts the wartime experiences of a young Ukrainian army officer named Yulia Mykytenko, whom we first meet in the besieged Donbas region. Commanding a reconnaissance unit employing first-person-view drones, Mykytenko says, matter-of-factly, "With a $500 FPV, you can destroy a tank that cost millions." So have she and her soldiers done, despite the gap in technology and supplies that the Ukrainian army suffers, with arms from the West arriving only in fits and starts and freighted with political considerations. Mykytenko's contempt for Russia is clear, but her assessment of the overly cautious West is scarcely more complimentary. Perhaps surprisingly, she has no shortage of criticisms for her nation's president, either: "The army on the ground knew the invasion would happen. When the intelligence services warned [Zelenskyy] in November 2021 that Russia was going to attack, he said, 'No, it's not going to happen.'" The country has since paid a terrible price, and Mykytenko has paid dearly herself: Her father committed suicide by self-immolation in protest against what he perceived to be Zelenskyy's failure to react strongly enough following Russia's seizure of Crimea, and her husband died in combat. "Ukraine was not ready for the 24 February 2022 invasion because Zelenskyy had neglected the armed forces, leaving them in a demoralized, ill-prepared and ill-equipped state, as my father and other veterans warned," she charges. Proudly, Mykytenko insists that Ukraine deserves NATO membership, not as a gift to the country but because it would make a valuable addition to NATO's order of battle: No other army would withstand Putin's as stubbornly, she asserts--and besides, "We could also teach NATO a great deal about efficiency in the heat of battle."

A wartime account of searing intensity and righteous anger.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Marlowe, Lara: HOW GOOD IT IS I HAVE NO FEAR OF DYING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f0d33ecc. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine. By Lara Marlowe. Feb. 2025. 312p. Melville, $29.99 (9781685891879); e-book, $14.99 (9781685891886). 947.7.

The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was just the latest escalation ofVladimir Putin's encroachments. Yulia Mykytenko, despite her young age, has been resisting since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, calling for Ukrainian freedom and independence. She married a soldier and joined the fight in the Donbas. After her father's shocking act of self-immolation in Kyiv in protest of the government's apparent appeasement of Russia, Lieutenant Mykytenko spoke with journalists. Back on the battle-field, she learned that her husband had been killed. Struck by Mykytenko's valor and candor, seasoned journalist Marlowe recounts Mykytenko's astounding story of patriotism and service, detailing her family's legacy of resistance within the context of her country's history and the gritty brutality of fighting on today's front lines. Here, too, is criticism of Western allies for dragging their feet in supplying necessary weapons and equipment. Marlowe does excellent work translating interviews with Mykytenko into seamless and beautifully written prose. This book provides everything readers want to know about the war in Ukraine and the indefatigable courage of that country's fighters. A tour de force of hope and service amid the destruction of a horrific, ongoing war.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Pekoll, James. "How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 7-8, Dec. 2024, p. 101. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829740151/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fefcc23c. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

"Marlowe, Lara: HOW GOOD IT IS I HAVE NO FEAR OF DYING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819570240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f0d33ecc. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025. Pekoll, James. "How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko's Fight for Ukraine." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 7-8, Dec. 2024, p. 101. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829740151/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fefcc23c. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.