Word: vying
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Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's most irrepressibly public philosopher, says he's always been fighting the same adversary: "the will to purity," whether political or racial. In a long career of public causes, he has seen that ill will on the faces of Nazi sympathizers, the Soviet nomenklatura, Pakistani generals fighting against Bangladesh's independence, and Serb paramilitaries bent on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Now he sees it in militant Islam - which he believes is perilously close to acquiring nuclear arms. Lévy's latest book was not prompted by political theory, but brute fact: the murder...
...Fighting Purity From Bosnia to Afghanistan, Lévy has sought to halt the spread of extremism THE ENVOY: At the request of French President Jacques Chirac, Lévy traveled to Afghanistan in February 2002 to gauge the needs of the Afghan people, and plot France's role in rebuilding the country following the fall of the Taliban THE INQUIRER: Prompted by the murder of Daniel Pearl, above, Lévy traveled widely to expose the role of Islamic militants in Pearl's death. Lévy claims that Pearl - "a refutation of his killers' view of a clash...
...year of remarkable research that took him from the urban wastelands of Karachi to Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, from London to Dubai and Bosnia, and from fact to a kind of fiction. In retracing Pearl's last steps - the story that got him killed - Lévy concludes that the reporter's kidnapping, decapitation and dismemberment was essentially a "crime of state" that implicates parts of the Pakistani government. And it is in Pakistan, he believes, where al-Qaeda's "madmen of God" mesh with nuclear scientists and intelligence chiefs, that a battle must be joined that will dwarf...
...fictionalized scenes help the book read like a novel, but Lévy doesn't need them to reach his conclusion: that Pearl's murder was ordered - precisely by whom he admits he doesn't know - because "he knew too much" that linked top Pakistani bombmakers and intelligence chiefs to al-Qaeda. That claim grows out of an accretion of detail that seems plausible but is hardly airtight: he cites an unnamed policeman who contends that Sheikh secretly surrendered to Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency (ISI) on May 5, 2002, then spent a week in a safe house before allowing...
...film industry, by comparison, produced 204 movies last year (a jump of 20%) and sold 76 million tickets. Though a number of European countries - Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain - actually print more books, publishing in France still enjoys a mystique rivaling that of cinema. Authors like Bernard-Henri Lévy and 2001 Goncourt prizewinner Jean-Christophe Rufin are megacelebrities, and book-themed talk shows are standard TV fare. Notes Pierre Assouline, editor of Lire magazine: "The French have always felt writing was the noblest form of communication, and most honest kind of reflection. To write is to live...