Amazon.com Review
While just a young boy growing up in Texas, still playing cowboys and Indians in what was once Comanche country,
William R. Polk listened excitedly to stories from his aging grandmother "Molly" Harding Polk. Molly was a child, and later bride, of the American Civil War, and had grown up listening to stories from her grandfather, born during the Revolutionary War. "So, in just two memories," William R. relates, "I had laid out for me tales of the entire history of the United States."
This upbringing gave Polk a start in understanding both his country's history and that of his family--which, as it turns out, lays claim to more than a few noteworthy Americans. Later a teacher at Harvard and history professor at the University of Chicago (not to mention a state department vet under both Johnson and Kennedy, making William R. a formidable American in his own right), Polk turned his professional scrutiny to studying this remarkable lineage, which includes comrades-in-arms of George Washington, more than a few plucky frontiersmen (one who was accused of shooting the sheriff of Laredo--in self-defense, of course), a four-star general who was a brilliant WWII tank commander under Patton, a feisty lawyer who defended Martin Luther King, and America's tireless 11th president, James Knox Polk.
Using these lives and the intimate stories surrounding them, Polk traces the story of our country in a meaningful, personal, and coherent way, "hang[ing] my tale of American history on a sort of 'backbone,' composed of my family." --Paul Hughes
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The Polk family history is a vast and fertile territory, studded with an early revolutionary (Thomas Polk), a general who battled Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War (Leonidas Polk) and an American president (James K. Polk), not to mention a widow who was nearly wedded to the Prince of Wales (Sarah Polk Bradford). Drawing on a wealth of family documents, the author (a State Department official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) sketches the exhausting Polk saga, from Robert Pollok's 1680 arrival in what became Somerset County, Md., to stirring accounts of various Polks' heroism in WWII. The book's center of gravity, however, is the meticulous diary left by President Polk, which was never intended for publication and offers a behind-the-scenes account of the Mexican War. Named for the parcel of swampy land where the Polks first settled in America, Polk's Folly says as much about one family's misadventures as it does about the grand processional of American history. Polk does an admirable job of setting his family's journey within the context of the young nation's travails, but the almost painterly details afforded by family documents are occasionally overwhelmed by grand brush strokes of historical narrative. The most telling moments occur in minor historical footnotes. During the Civil War, for example, General Polk was killed by a cannon shot fired just a few feet from a distant cousin, a soldier in the Union army. The book is most enjoyable when it delves into such details of the Polk family, least absorbing when it rather dutifully and without much color recapitulates widely documented historical events. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
