Empire and the Five Kings, The: America's Abdication and the Fate of the World - Hardcover

"Often arresting, always heartfelt prose. This is a brave book . . . we need Mr. Lévy's voice." --Martin Peretz, The Wall Street Journal

"An erudite and impassioned call for the West to retake the lead in championing liberty."--Kirkus Reviews

"Striking. . . Lévy's analysis of the internet landscape and its impact on truth is deeply insightful." --Publishers Weekly

"The Empire and the Five Kings is that rare book that few write anymore, and few even know how to. It is the product of a truly literate mind of the sort that has virtually gone extinct in this postliterate digital age." --Robert D. Kaplan, author of The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

"Bernard-Henri Lévy puts his deep firsthand knowledge of the world together with his extraordinary gift for horizontal thinking--leaping easily from epoch to epoch and from one philosophical idea to the next--to offer a startling and persuasive picture of this moment of decisive historical transition." --Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon and At the Strangers' Gate

"At the heart of Bernard-Henri Lévy's passionate essay is his anger at the betrayal of the Kurds. He spirals out from there to offer a strongly felt portrait of our contemporary reality in which the 'empire of nothing, ' the West that has lost its way, risks being superseded by new powers, the 'five kings, pathetic yet daunting, cartoonish yet terrible.' A challenging analysis, at once scholarly and readable." --Salman Rushdie

"In this exquisite gem of a book, Bernard-Henri Levy offers a poetic plea for moral courage and clear thinking in these dark times. He is an international treasure." --Robert Kagan, author of Of Paradise and Power and The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World

"A characteristically trenchant and poignant polemic that is part cri-de-coeur, part battle cry . . . The Empire and the Five Kings represents an important, learned assessment of the mounting challenges facing the United States in confronting an increasingly multipolar world order." --The Federalist