Review review

[jheaton]

Here is a fair (i.e. evenhanded) review of Walter Borneman's Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, which as I've said before is in my opinion the best of the Polk bios out there. She raises a good point about Polk being a slave owner, a fact that is glossed over in nearly every Polk biography I've read, the exception being

Comments

[shannon_a]

Cool facts about Tyler. Makes me want to read a bit more about him :)

[jheaton]

I read Edward Crapol's 2006 bio John Tyler, the Accidental President and it was good, if a little disjointed, as though he had compiled it from a number of journal articles he's written about him. You'd probably do just as well with Tyler's entry in Schlesinger's American Presidents series. I haven't read that one, but I've found the quality of the books in that series to be quite high, and at 200 pages it better qualifies as "a bit more" than Crapol's 350 pages.