A Parisian in America

Before getting to the things that Bernard-Henri Lévy does well in American Vertigo, his entertaining and insightful account of how, last year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville — the aristocratic French author renowned for his perceptive and enduring classic, Democracy in America — the U.S. monthly magazine Atlantic commissioned Lévy, who is perhaps the world's most famous living celebrity-intellectual, to retrace the steps of De Tocqueville's 1831-32 ramble through the young republic, a trip that inspired Democracy, let's identify, just for the record, the single most annoying flaw in Lévy's tome: overly long sentences....