“Every desire is a desire to be,” said the famous French-American philosopher Rene Girard. It is our desires that define who we are, but they do not belong to us: being mimetic (imitative and mirror), they turn us into an endless series of other people's reflections. Desire is a lifelong evolution: we begin to imitate as children, we compete at school and at work, we want more and more, we suffer when we don’t get what we want, and we repent on our deathbed. Cynthia Haven's book is the first biography of Girard of its kind, based on conversations with him, his family, friends and colleagues from France and the United States. The life of the thinker appears in it as an illustration of his theory, which is revealed not as an abstract speculative concept, but as a philosophy for life, which he was the first to strive to practice. Years of study in his native Avignon and dank occupied Paris, a fateful move to the USA, religious conversion in late 1950s, the discovery of the violent origins of culture, doubt, recognition and its temptations - the reader learns how his spiritual and creative evolution unfolded from his first work, “The Lies of Romanticism and the Truth of the Novel,” through the fundamental “Violence and the Sacred” to the dark apocalyptic prophecies of his final book “Completing Clausewitz.”