Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political thinkers of all time. Born a French aristocrat, he lost nearly his entire family in the Reign of Terror, and spent most of his adult life struggling for liberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France. He was a man of apparent contradictions: an aristocrat who believed in democracy, a conservative with liberal ideals, an agnostic with Christian faith in humanity. At age 25...

"Witty, moving, informative, and inspiring, Signed, Sealed, Delivered begins with Nina Sankovitch's discovery of trunk filled with a trove of hundred-year old letters in an old house she has just bought with her husband. They are from a Princeton freshman to his mother. Sankovitch cannot help think of her own son, who is about to go off to Harvard, and of the letters she's kept and cherished from a beloved sister and from her husband. From there she...