War, Evil and End of History

From the celebrated author of the international bestseller Who Killed Daniel Pearl? comes another startlingly original work of literature. In WAR, EVIL AND THE END OF HISTORY, Bernard-Henri Levy 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 recently 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. Levy 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 Levy 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 one of the world's most popular philosophers at the height of his powers.