The Flight of the Intellectuals: The Controversy Over Islamism and the Press Paperback - 2011

“An intellectual thriller in the form of a polemic, with Inspector Berman hunting for clues... Maybe Berman's book will start intellectuals talking, and not just about each other. Maybe some of the previously silent will begin to speak out against the death squads rather than snark about their victims and targets.”
—Ron Rosenbaum, Slate

"Fascinating... This bracing and volatile book is an important one and devastating in its conclusions."
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Paul Berman is, just like me and I think many others, surprised—and that’s an understatement—that some liberals choose to defend ideas that are very illiberal and choose to look away from practices that are even more illiberal. Why are they excusing radical Islam? That fascinates Berman and it also fascinates me, what the presence of Islam does to the liberal psyche in the West."
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"It has been quite astonishing to see how far and how fast there has been a capitulation to the believable threat of violence.... I join with Paul Berman in expressing utter astonishment at this phenomenon, or rather at the way that it is not a phenomenon."
—Christopher Hitchens

“Berman… has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them.”
—Anthony Julius, New York Times Book Review
 
“How do you distinguish a jihadist from a ‘moderate’ Muslim? Paul Berman's Flight of the Intellectuals brilliantly dissects the moral confusion and cowardice that contrives to sway some brave men and women. Must reading for our times.”
—Harold Evans, Daily Beast
 
“Brilliant, uncompromising.”
—Michael Young, Slate

Praise for Paul Berman
“One of our most gifted essayists, a deeply pensive writer with a lyrical talent for imaginative synthesis.”
—The Boston Globe

“One of America’ s best exponents of recent intellectual history.”
—The Economist

Paul Berman is the author of A Tale of Two Utopias, The New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism, and Power and the Idealists. He writes for The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Magazine.