Parrot and Olivier in America

This was a slow start, but then I became utterly engrossed in the lives of Parrot and Olivier, though I often wished this was just Parrot's story -- what a life. Having never read de Toqueville I'm not sure if his trip to America and his writing about it was as vacuous and misjudged as Olivier's books almost certainly were. And while Parrot derides Olivier's ultimate conclusions about where democracy in America would lead, I fear 200 years later that Olivier's truths are being born out. Hopefully we as Americans can soon rise above the place we find ourselves these days with half the country merely trying to out yell the other half.