A decent view of Polk's four years in office, primarily dealing with Texas and the Mexican-American war. But it's told almost entirely from a Washington insider perspective (the author is a WSJ journalist), based on Washington partisan newspapers, Polk's diary, and letters with the President. It's about twice as long as it needs to be for this, and often devolves into pages talking about bickering between two senators or Polk and Buchanan - mildly interesting and similar to today, but not what I was looking for.