Bernard Henri-Lévy is perhaps the most controversial French intellectual alive. The founder of the "nouveaux-philosophes" school in France, he has managed to remain in the cultural spotlight for thirty years. Yet despite his media-savvy personality and good looks, exactly who he is as a person, and why he continues to elicit such a range of emotions — running the gamut from outright denigration to quasi-religious worship — is a mystery, explains Boggio. The author retraces BHL's life from his family roots in pre-WWII Algeria through his privileged Parisian childhood to his jet-setting international media-star life of today, in relentless pursuit of the man behind the Ray-bans.

Lévy recently toured the United States following in the footsteps of Tocqueville and recording his own impressions. The resulting articles are being published in seven parts in The Atlantic Monthly and a book of these essays will be published by Random House. He is a regular on Charlie Rose, and is renowned for his works Who Killed Daniel Pearl? (Melville, 2003), and War, Evil, and the End of History (Melville, 2004), among others.