The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Edmund Morris begins not at a cradle but in the Blue Room of the White House on New Year's Day, 1907, where the President shakes more than eight thousand hands in an afternoon and ends stronger than he began. Then the book turns back to a wheezing boy propped upright at night so he can breathe, and to the father who told him he had the mind but not the body, and would have to build the body himself.