Postcards from the Edge - Tocqueville’s Letters Home

From NYT:

"Ostensibly, Tocqueville and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison system for the French government, and on their return they dutifully filed a lengthy report — a book so forbidding that, though he owns a copy, Mr. Brown has so far avoided reading it.

But almost from the start of his trip Tocqueville, at least, seems to have imagined another kind of book, a study of Americans themselves, and he turned every encounter with them into a reporting mission. “No one is better set up for the study of the American people than we are,” he wrote to Edouard. “Our mission and our letters open all doors; we rub shoulders with all classes.”"

Having read the selections that the article mentions, I can confirm they are indeed delightful. (His first letter, like that of any good son, was to his mother.) Tocqueville himself was a delight, at least as far as I remember him from reading Democracy in America in college, even at his most prosaic. I would have loved to have a glass of wine with him, especially given that, with his pedigree, he probably had an amazing cellar. The kind of wine you should drink like water.