cover image CHASING THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE: A Journey in Tocqueville's Footsteps Through Contemporary America

CHASING THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE: A Journey in Tocqueville's Footsteps Through Contemporary America

David Cohen, . . Picador USA, $24 (312pp) ISBN 978-0-312-26154-2

French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville's famed 1831 trek and resulting book, Democracy in America, is closely shadowed by South African journalist Cohen's own journey. Both explorers went from the contrasting wealth and poverty of New York, to Detroit, and through the Southern states. Importantly, Cohen adds California's Silicon Valley to his itinerary in order to assess the evolution of Tocqueville's America. The dramatically different backgrounds of these two foreign explorers offer an intriguing starting point. But Cohen sticks uncomfortably close to task, spending much of his time establishing corollaries between Tocqueville's journey and his own. He predicates his assessment of the ongoing fate of America solely on the haves and have-nots, those oft-mentioned neighbors clustered in the narrow valley of socioeconomic determinism. Fixated on this general disparity, Cohen's thesis undertakes an unsettling conflation of cold demographic data and raison d'être statements from the working poor and the independently wealthy. In Louisville, Ky., he talks with numerous loyal fans of the actual Colonel Sanders, who died in 1980. He meets with the Holiday Inn founder, who began in 1951 and 20 years later was opening a new hotel every three days. He semi-successfully draws from census data and Tocqueville's writings to support his own observations. Despite the author's wit, ambition, admirable prose and obvious empathy for the lower classes, the comparison between Cohen and his predecessor is not sufficiently strong or compelling to provide the defining (and timely) view of Democracy in America. (Nov. 1)