The testament of God

Lévy, Bernard-Henri

Harper&Row

A trenchant look at how the coronavirus reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society As seen on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS:&nbsp;"A stirring alarm addressed to an unsettled world." (Kirkus Reviews) &nbsp; Forget the world that came before. The author of American Vertigo serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society. &nbsp; With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has irrevocably altered societies around the world. In this sharp essay, world-renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy interrogates the many meanings and metaphors we have assigned to the pandemic--and what they tell us about ourselves. &nbsp; Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Foucault, Lévy asks uncomfortable questions about reality and mythology: he rejects the idea that the virus is a warning from nature, the inevitable result of global capitalism; he questions the heroic status of doctors, asking us to think critically about the loci of authority and power; he challenges the panicked polarization that dominates online discourse. Lucid, incisive, and always original, Lévy takes a bird's-eye view of the most consequential historical event of our time and proposes a way to defend human society from threats to our collective future. A portion of the author's proceeds will be donated to Binc (The Book Industry Charitable Foundation).

The Virus in the Age of Madness

History

Yale University Press

The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope

An unflinching look at the most urgent humanitarian crises around the globe, from one of the world's most daring philosopher-reporters Despite the difficulties of travel during the coronavirus pandemic, renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has reported extensively on human rights abuses that have escaped global attention or active response. This new book collects those reports into a powerful treatise on--as well as a cri de coeur for--what it means to be a citizen of the world. &nbsp; In a deeply personal introduction, Lévy recounts the intellectual journey that led him to advocacy, arguing that a truly humanist philosophy must necessarily lead to action in defense of the most vulnerable. In the second section, he reports on the eight investigative trips he undertook just before or during the pandemic, from the massacred Christian villages in Nigeria to a dangerously fragile Afghanistan on the eve of the Taliban talks, from an anti-Semitic ambush in Tarhouna to the overrun refugee camp on the island of Lesbos. Part manifesto, part missives from the field, this new book is a stirring rebuke to indifference and an exhortation to level our gaze at those most hidden from us.

A translation of the French best-seller presents a subjective conversation between a journalist and philosopher, offering their respective and often clashing opinions about love, sex, marriage, fidelity, and politics. 15,000 first printing.

Women and Men: A Philosophical Conversation

Self-Help

Giroud, Françoise

Little,Brown & Co

Who Killed Daniel Pearl?

Americas

Melville House Publishing

War, Evil, and the End of History

From the maverick author of the international bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl? — "a gripping blend of reportage and philosophy," according to The New York Times — comes another startlingly original work of literature. In WAR, EVIL AND THE END OF HISTORY, Bernard-Henri Lévy continues his daring investigation into the breeding grounds of terrorism with a series of riveting first-person reports from five of the world's most horrific "forgotten" war zones. In Sri Lanka, he conducts a clandestine interview with a terrified young woman escaped from a suicide-bomber training camp . . . he journeys, blindfolded, into the Colombian jungle to interview a psychotic drug lord who considers himself the successor to Che Guevara and fronts a bloodthirsty "guerilla" army . . . Lévy surreptitiously observes the nameless slaves working the diamond mines that fund an endless war in Angola . . . airdrops into a rebel stronghold in the blockaded Nuba mountains of the Sudan . . . and reports on the ongoing carnage in Burundi between Hutus and Tutsis. But Lévy is more than just a journalist: as France's leading philosopher, he follows the reports with a series of intensely personal and probing "reflections" considering how, in an enlightened, cultured, and well-informed society, these wars have acquired such a perverse "non-meaning." He considers war literature from Stendhal, Hemingway, Proust and others, and issues an excoriating response to those who have glorified it. He reconsiders his own background as a student revolutionary in Paris in May 1968, and as a 22-year-old war reporter in Bangladesh. And, in one of the book's most moving passages, he recounts his travels with Ahmad Massoud, the anti-Taliban Afghan leader assassinated hours before the September 11 attacks. Already a huge bestseller in Europe, WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is the work of a scintillating intellect at the height of its powers. Bernard-Henri Lévy's previous book foresaw today's headlines about Pakistan's secret trading of nuclear technology and the nexus of terrorist groups behind the murder of Daniel Pearl. WAR, EVIL, AND THE END OF HISTORY is his brilliant foray into the next danger zones.

War, Evil, and The End of History

Melville House

"A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him." This was how Jean-Paul Sartre characterized himself at the end of his autobiographical study, Words. And Bernard-Henri Levy shows how Sartre cannot be understood without taking into account his relations with the intellectual forebears and contemporaries, the lovers and friends, with whom he conducted a lifelong debate. His thinking was essentially a tumultuous dialogue with his whole age and himself. He learned from Gide the art of freedom, and how to experiment with inherited fictional forms. He was a fellow-traveller of communism, and yet his relations with the Party were deeply ambiguous. He was fascinated by Freud but trenchantly critical of psychoanalysis. Beneath Sartre's complex and ever-mutating political commitments, Levy detects a polarity between anarchic individualism on the one hand, and a longing for absolute community that brought him close to totalitarianism on the other. Levy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century's catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings.

Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Polity Press

What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today?To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country. The result isAmerican Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our democracy: the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth. Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice. At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville

Humor & Entertainment

Random House Publishing Group

In this unprecedented critique, Bernard-Henri Lévy revisits his political roots, scrutinizes the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those on the horizon, and argues powerfully for a new political and moral vision for our times. Are human rights Western or universal? Does anti-Semitism have a future, and, if so, what will it look like? And how is it that progressives themselves–those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism–have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes: an unthinking loathing of Israel; an obsessive anti-Americanism; an idea of “tolerance” that, in its justification of Islamic fanaticism, for example, could become the “cemetery of democracies”; and an indifference, masked by relativism, to the greatest human tragedies facing the world today? At a time of ideological and political transition in America, Left in Dark Times articulates the threats we all face–in many cases without our even being aware of it–and offers a powerful new vision for progressives everywhere.

Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Random House Trade Paperbacks

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Books by Lévy, Bernard-Henri