President Theodore Roosevelt

He begins as a small boy fighting air and time. The asthma comes at night like a thief and sits on his chest; the child hears the rattle of his own breathing and learns, much earlier than most, that life does not hand out strength—it must be built. In a brownstone on East 20th Street, in a house that smells of books and leather and ocean salt carried in on his father’s coats, he studies insects in jam jars, birds through a little window onto the roof, muscles through pain with the help of a doting, formidable parent who tells him the sentence he will carry like a creed: you have the mind but not the body; make the body. He sets up a gym in the family home, lifts iron dumbbells until his arms shake, pounds a bag, rows, hikes, wrestles his own lungs into submission. He reads like a person storing fuel—Plutarch and ...