Reviews for Tocqueville's Discovery of America

The average rating for Tocqueville's Discovery of America based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-08-01 00:00:00 David E Lee A wonderful companion to Peter Carey's 'Parrot and Olivier,' Damrosch's work sticks with the real historical figure, while still offering a fresh perspective. 'Discovery' follows Tocqueville through his nine month peregrination using contemporary accounts from the same times, places, and personalities found in his notes, which Damrosch does a beautiful job of translating. Tocqueville certainly made keen and pithy observations on the new land he was visiting, some of which have proved their truth over many years. He was far less judgmental than other European tourists of the period, like Charles Dickens and Francis Trollope (Anthony's mother), who saw 'a nation of spitters.' But Damrosch reminds us Tocqueville was also a very real young man, who could be insecure, depressed, compulsive, and frustrated with the sexual mores of American women. And that he was sometimes wrong, as when he portrayed a vast and homogenous middle class without economic divisions, or when he failed to see the cagey intelligence behind Andrew Jackson's corn-pone personality. Tocqueville's journey (with his friend Gustave de Beaumont) itself makes for a good story--something Peter Carey picked up on. The two men were indefatigable travelers, tramping through endless forest and bouncing over relentlessly rough roads, bearing up under illness, mosquitos, and a freakishly cold Southern winter, meeting luminaries and common folk. They were up for an adventure, and they had one. Damrosch presents their story in a slender and immensely readable volume that makes excellent use of primary sources, acknowledges modern perspectives, and even concisely assesses both the myth and the matter of Tocqueville's masterpiece, 'Democracy in America.'

Review # 2 was written on 2010-08-05 00:00:00 Maria Krauss-lacka Damrosch does an excellent job of tracing Tocqueville and his companion's trip across America and their changing thoughts and feelings about the country. Damrosch refers to Tocqueville's book as "prescient" and that is exactly how I felt years ago reading it for a class. Perhaps only an outsider could have been so spot-on about the effects of democracy on a culture. If you read it for yourself, you will probably think, as I did, "could he really have been writing in the early 19th-century?" Because it shows remarkable insight (and foresight). "In proportion as slavery departs, the whites grow more afraid of mixing the races and grow more contemptuous. The law is less harsh, but hatred is more so." He is anticipating here the work of 20th century anthropologists like Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Freed African-Americans were thrust into a social limbo--a liminal state as Turner called it--they were hated and feared for no longer being in a fixed, controllable category. Tocqueville, in many ways, was a social anthropologist before the discipline existed and his book shows many such insights.