“A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent” is Robert Merry’s third book and was published in 2009. He is a former Wall Street Journal Washington correspondent and executive at Congressional Quarterly. Currently the editor of The National Interest, his most recent book “Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians” was published in 2012.

Although Merry’s biography of Polk is substantial in length (at nearly five-hundred pages of text) it is not a thorough account of Polk’s entire life.  Instead, like Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson, it is the detailed review of a presidency rather than a full-scale biography of a man who was once president. As a result… 

– Click here for the full review at BestPresidentialBios.com –