Polk's Folly: An American Family History

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.)