Yuriy shares his intriguing story of being the unlikely hero in a book about wartime Kyiv that's already a bestseller on pre-order and suggests how to get a mention of your own name in this podcast...
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TRANSCRIPT: (Podbean app users can enjoy closed captions)
It is January 3rd.
I've probably been asked a hundred times why I don't write books or other people did not even ask, but expressed deep surprise. But I don't write books. It usually looks something like this: "You personally acquainted with Bashar al-Assad, survived several Hamas interrogations in Gaza, maintain friendly relations with a family of the Samaritan High priest, and even received an order from Zelensky after voluntarily living civilian life enjoying the army. Why haven't you written a book about all this?"
The answer is very simple- I just don't want to do it. I've already written 5 billion texts about all this, and I'll write that much more if I get out of this war alive. I don't see the point in wasting my precious free time on something I've been doing all my life at work. I'm much more interested in reading books. Honestly.
But the fact that I don't want to be a book author does not negate the fact that I can be a hero in our people's books. And so it happened, but I really became the hero of one such book, not the main one, but one of noticeable ones. This book was written by my colleague and longtime friends, a journalist, Ilya Ponomarekno, who was born in a small town in DBAs, but has worked in Kyiv for many years. He has long collaborated with foreign media, but as it turned out, he also wrote a whole book about how Kyiv lived in the days when the Russian Army stood on the outskirts of a Ukrainian capital.
He told me about it himself when he sent me a New Year's greeting. He congratulated me. And when wrote what he had finished working on the book that is dedicated to the first stage of the full scale war, that this book will be released in English in the spring and also with one of the chapters of the book is dedicated to how I came to the studio of a radio station, from which I went to the Army to broadcast in uniform and with a rifle. He listened to this broadcast and wrote about it in his book.
I really hope that I turned out to be a positive character. You know that kind, that if we want to make a movie out of the book, the actor for my role would be chosen between Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale. By the way, it would be interesting to see how we would cope with this role. But jokes aside. The book is actually finished, has already been edited and is being prepared for printing, it can already be pre-ordered on Amazon, and I even did it. It'll be released on May 7th and will gradually be shipped to me. This book and its name is 'I Will Show You How It Was, The Story Of Wartime Kyiv' has already made it into the Amazon bestseller lists. Maybe you'll find it interesting too.
And a little hint for you, if you want me to mention you in this podcast, just write a book, a song, or maybe a symphony about me and you'll get the mention absolutely free. Happy New Year, my friends.
