Tocqueville: A Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.51 (954 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0801860679 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 558 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-06-06 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He does this with economy, grace, thoroughness, and reliability."--George Armstrong Kelly, New Republic. But he manages to recapture much of its original freshness, and he makes effective use, as elsewhere, of previously unpublished documents."--John Gross, New York Times"Jardin gives us a concise and balanced account of Tocqueville's public positions and passions. " Tocqueville: A Biography is a book of considerable importance, primarily because of its comprehensive treatment of both Tocqueville's public life and his private life--including many details necessarily absent from the two previous biographical essays."--John Lukacs, The New YorkerIn this first major biography of the author of Democracy in America, André Jardin traces Alexis de Tocqueville's eventful life from his birth in 1805 to aristocratic parents in post-revolutionary France, through his trip to antebellum America as a young man, his adventures in Algeria, and his political career in France's Second Republic, to his return to writing and the publication of his other classic work L'Ancien régime et la révolution in 1856. It is the triumph of André Jardin's biography that it shows so clearly how this is so."--Hugh Brogan, Times Literary Supplement"Mr. Jardin is the complete master of his subject. His portrait of the writer is lucid and well composed, his comments are penetrating, and he draws on a wide range of unfamiliar mater
Delightful surprise César González Rouco This is a wonderful biography. I knew that Tocqueville was a great thinker, but I thought that his life would be boring (are thoughts worth being told? Yes, this book indeed proves it). However, the author manages to narrate Tocqueville's life and times in such a way that I could not put it down, and read it in less than a week's time. So I may not think of a better book to commemorate Tocqueville's bicentennial anniversary and I fully agree and endorse, as my own, the other reviewer's opinion.
This magisterial and absorbing biography is by a French historian who is general editor of Tocqueville's collected works. egalitarian experiment; in his analyses of rampant individualism, tyranny of the majority, creeping bureaucracy and alienation within a consumerist society, he seems very much our contemporary. From Publishers Weekly Alexis de Tocqueville was an aristocrat, a severe prison reformer, a colonialist who applied the lessons of Canada to French rule in Algeria. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. He was also, in his classic Democracy in America , a farsighted observer of the U.S. . Jardin delineates his subject as a sickly, sensitive child, short-tempered husband of a middle-class Englishwoman, indefatigable traveler, ambitious politician and, above all, as a moralist who felt that only a spiritual force could lift the masses above petty, selfish int