Alexis de Tocqueville is best known for having written a brilliant study of the emerging American democracy, its politics and form of government, its economics, demographics, and attitudes, in short almost everything that could be known about this new country and the character of the new man, the "American." His book is, of course, Democracy in America. His insights were the result of a nine-month trip that he made to the United States with a friend in 1831. ''Fifteen Days in the Wilderness'' is the journal that Tocqueville kept of a trek the two men took into the lower Michigan peninsula, a side-trip that he hoped would permit him to experience the American landscape in its natural state and to observe its native inhabitants before they were overwhelmed by the advance of European ''civilization.'' To this fresh translation we have attached a journal of a 2016 automobile trip by poet Harvey Mudd that retraces Tocqueville's route, Detroit to Saginaw, that provides a contemporary look...