BRAVE HEARTS-Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa of Calcutta (August 26, 1910 – September 5, 1997), born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun with Indian citizenship who founded theMissionaries of charity in(Calcutta)On September 10, 1946, Her father, Kolë Bojaxhiu was involved in Albanian politics. In 1919, after a political meeting, which left Skopje out of Albania, he fell ill and died when Agnes was about eight years old. After her father's death, her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. in her early years Agnes was fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and their service, and by age 12 was convinced that she should commit herself to a religious life. She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary. She never again saw her mother or sister.She took her first religious vows as a nun on May 24, 1931. She began her missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton sari decorated with a blue border, adopted Indian citizenship, and ventured out into the slums. Initially she started a school in Motijhil; soon she started tending to the needs of the destitute and starving. In 1962, Mother Teresa received the Philippines-based Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding, given for work in South or East Asia. By the early 1970s, Mother Teresa had become an international celebrity. Teresa wrote in her diary that her first year was fraught with difficulties. She had no income and had to resort to begging for food and supplies. Teresa experienced doubt, loneliness and the temptation to return to the comfort of convent life during these early monthsTeresa received Vatican permission on October 7, 1950 to start the diocesan congregation that would become the Missionaries of Charity. Its mission was to care for, in her own words, "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." It began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta; today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine. With the help of Indian officials she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday). hose brought to the home received medical attention and were afforded the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites As the Missionaries of Charity took in increasing numbers of lost children, Mother Teresa felt the need to create a home for them. In 1955 she opened the Nirmala Shishu Bhavan, the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart, as a haven for orphans and homeless youth. Mother Teresa then expanded the order throughout the globe. Its first house outside India opened in Venezuela in 1965 with five sisters. Others followed in Rome, Tanzania, and Austria in 1968; during the 1970s the order opened houses and foundations in dozens of countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States.She was awarded the  Padma   Shri  in 1962. She continued to receive major Indian rewards in successive decades including, in 1972, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding and, in 1980, India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratan In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she traveled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patientsBy 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Mother Teresa suffered a heart attack in Rome in 1983, while visiting Pope John Paul II. After a second attack in 1989, she received an artificial pacemaker. In 1991, after a battle with pneumonia while in Mexico, she suffered further heart problems. In April 1996, Mother Teresa fell and broke her collar bone. In August she suffered from malaria and failure of the left heart ventricle. She had heart surgery, but it was clear that her health was declining. On March 13, 1997, she stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity and died on September 5, 1997. 

BRAVE HEARTS- Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton (born Michael Bolotin on February 26, 1953), is an American singer-songwriter, best known for his soft rock ballads and tenor vocals. He is the descendant of observant Jewish grandparents who kept a kosher home Bolton, raised very liberal-minded,  having both a Christmas tree and a menorah in his house.As a young man, his house was often filled with politicians. While his father worked for the City of New Haven and helped politicians get reelected, his mother played the perfect hostess and also worked with women's organizations. Bolton had never imagined then, as the city's elite congregated on the wraparound porch of his childhood home, that one day he, himself, would be dining in the White House With that same open-mindedness, Bolton has explored many spiritual paths that departed from his own religion. At the age of 15, he began studying Buddhism and in later years took a serious interest in ancient forms of Eastern practice and meditation. He has written over 100 songs for an impressive array of artists This man of abundant creativity and energy has produced 19 albums.Deaf in one ear, his achievements include selling 53 million albums, eight top ten albums, two number one singles on the Billboard charts, and awards from both the American Music Awards and Grammy Awards.He says,

"Oh, for as long as I am breathing,

Till the stars fall from the sky, 

You're the one thing I believe in,
My every reason why." 

BRAVE HEARTS-John Milton

John Milton (9 December, 1608 – 8November,1674) was an English poet, prose, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton was writing at a time of religious and political flux in England. His poetry and prose reflect deep convictions.After Milton was born, on 9 December 1608, his father's prosperity provided his eldest son with a private tutor, Thomas Young, and then a place at St Paul's School in London. There he began the study of Latin and Greek, and the classical languages left an imprint on his poetry in English (he wrote also in Italian and Latin). His first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington.At Cambridge he developed a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, but experienced alienation from his peers and university life as a whole. He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for a prospective poetical career Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted in total blindness by 1654, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell. He was impoverished and yet unrepentant for his political choices. he died in 1674 

BRAVE HEARTS- Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte, (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) later known as Napoleon I, was a French military and political leader who had a significant impact on the history of Europe. He was a general during the French Revolution, the ruler of France as First Consul of the French Republic and Emperor of the First French Empire. Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, 2,000 km from any major landmass.In the early years of exile Napoleon received visitors but, as the restrictions placed on him were increased, his life became that of a recluse.Napoleon married Joséphine in 1796, when he was 26; she was a 32-year old widow whose first husband had been executed during the revolution. Until she met Bonaparte, she had always been Rose, a name which he disliked. He called her 'Joséphine.When Napoleon joins his army in March 1796, he found himself in command of 37,000 men who are demoralized, badly fed and unpaid. During April he led them in a series of rapid victories which vastly raised the soldiers' spirits and held out the promise of rich loot under this energetic young commander.In fifteen days he gained six victories, took twenty-one colours and fifty-five pieces of artillery, seized several fortresses and conquered the richest parts of Piedmont. In time he met with the fateful battle of waterloo.On August 7  Napoleon was transferred to the Northumberland for the long journey to St Helena, the rocky island in the Atlantic which Britain used as a staging post for ships sailing to and from the east. Here, living with a small staff of his own in the island's main house, Longwood, Napoleon spent the remaining six years of his life.The visitors became fewer and his life much bleaker for two reasons - the arrival in 1816 of Hudson Lowe as the governor of the island (antipathy between him and Napoleon is exacerbated by Lowe's many acts of pettiness), and the onset of disease. From the end of 1817 Napoleon was increasingly ill - officially from cancer of the stomach, which the doctors declared to be the cause of his death in 1821. But the circumstances make possible, and perhaps inevitable, frequent claims that he was the victim of poisoning (modern scientific tests on strands of his hair, kept as mementoes, are said to reveal an unusually high level of arsenic). Napoleon, by contrast,was a provincial boy in Europe's largest and most sophisticated kingdom. He first achieved the apparently impossible task of rising to become head of state, with almost limitless power. He then imposed his will on the rest of continental Europe, maintaining a dominant role for France through his military, administrative and diplomatic skills and by the sheer power of his personality.

 

BRAVE HEARTS-John Forbes Nash, Jr.

John Forbes Nash,Jr.  (born June 13, 1928),

 is an American mathematician and economist. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.In Princeton campus legend, Nash became "The Phantom of Fine Hall" (Fine Hall is Princeton's mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night.Nash's recent work involves ventures in advanced game theory, including partial agency, that show that, as in his early career, he prefers to select his own path and problems. Between 1945 and 1996, he published 23 scientific studies.In 1951, Nash went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty. There, he met Alicia López-Harrison de Lardé (born January 1, 1933), a physics student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. Alicia admitted Nash to a mental hospital in 1959 for schizophrenia. He began to show signs of extreme paranoia and his wife later described his behavior as becoming increasingly erratic, stating that he began speaking of characters who were putting him in danger. Nash mailed letters to foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. declaring that he was establishing a world government.He was involuntarily admitted into the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild clinical depression.He was in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being involuntarily committed. After 1970 he was never committed to the hospital again and never took antipsychotic medication again.Nash recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that "I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally."Nash is also the subject of the Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, which was nominated for eight Oscars (winning four), and was based on the biography of the same name about him, his mathematical genius and his struggle with schizophrenia. His theories are still used today in market economics, computing, accounting and military theory.

BRAVE HEARTS-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initialsFDR, was the thirty-second President of the United States.He was a central figure of the 20th century during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war.He is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms.In August 1921, while the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Roosevelt contracted an illness, at the time believed to be polio, which resulted in Roosevelt's total and permanent paralysis from the waist down. For the rest of his life, Roosevelt refused to accept that he was permanently paralyzed. He tried a wide range of therapies, including hydrotherapy, and, in 1926, he purchased a resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he founded a hydrotherapy center for the treatment of polio patients which still operates as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. After he became President, he helped to found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes). His leadership in this organization is one reason he is commemorated on the dime. At the time, Roosevelt was able to convince many people that he was in fact getting better, which he believed was essential if he was to run for public office again. Fitting his hips and legs with iron braces, he laboriously taught himself to walk a short distance by swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane. In private, he used a wheelchair, but he was careful never to be seen in it in public. He usually appeared in public standing upright, supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons.Roosevelt, only 62 in 1944, was in declining health since at least 1940. The strain of his paralysis and the physical exertion needed to compensate for it for over 20 years had taken their toll, as had many years of stress and a lifetime of chain-smoking. By this time, Roosevelt had numerous ailments including chronic high blood pressure, emphysema, atherosclerosis, angina pectoris and end-stage heart disease.On March 30, 1945, Roosevelt went to Warm Springs to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations. On the afternoon of April 12, Roosevelt said, "I have a terrific headache" and was carried into his bedroom. The doctor diagnosed that he had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Later that day, he died. As Allen Drury later said, “so ended an era, and so began another.” An editorial by The New York Times declared, "Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House," after Roosevelt's death.

Roosevelt's death was met with shock and grief across the U.S. and around the world. His declining health had not been known to the general public. Roosevelt had been president for more than 12 years, longer than any other person, and had led the country through some of its greatest crises to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and to within sight of the defeat of Japan as well.At the time he collapsed, Roosevelt had been sitting for a portrait painting by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, resulting in the famous Unfinished Portrait of FDR.

 

Brave Hearts - Stevie Wonder

Stevie Wonder (born Stevland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, name later changed to Stevland Hardaway Morris)  is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. Wonder had been blind from infancy.

A prominent figure in popular music during the latter half of the 20th century, Wonder has recorded more than thirty top ten hits, won 26 Grammy Awards (a record for a solo artist), plus one for lifetime achievement, won an Academy Award for Best Song  and been inducted into both the Rock and Roll and Songwriters halls of fame.

 He has also been awarded the Polar Music Prize.  Wonder signed with Motown Records as a pre-adolescent at age twelve, and continues to perform and record for the label to this day. He has ten U.S. number-one hits on the pop Charts, 20 U.S.  number one hits, and album sales totaling more than 150 million units. Wonder has recorded several critically acclaimed albums and hit singles, and writes and produces songs for many of his label mates and outside artists as well. 

Wonder plays the piano, synthesizer, harmonica, congas, drums, bongos, organ, melodica, and clavinet. In his early career, he was best known for his harmonica work, but today he is better known for his keyboard skills and vocal ability

Brave Hearts - Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf  blind person to graduate from collegeHelen Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, Keller had a particular form of the disease that brought blindness and retardation. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. Later Keller learned Braille and used it to read not only English but also French, German, Greek, and Latin. Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and authorOne of Keller's earliest pieces of writing, at the age of eleven, was The Frost King (1891). Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908 giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a series of essays on Socialism, was published in 1913. In total Keller wrote 12 books and numerous articles. Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.

Brave Hearts - Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, EnglandStephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973 Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and since 1979 has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas, who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow, and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton.

When he was young, he enjoyed riding horses and playing with other children. At Oxford, he coxed a rowing team, which, he stated, helped relieve his immense boredom at the university. Symptoms of the disorder first appeared while he was enrolled at Cambridge; The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, shortly before his first marriage, and doctors said he would not survive more than two or three years. Hawking gradually lost the use of his arms, legs, and voice, and is now almost completely paralysed.

His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W Israel. Stephen Hawking has three popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays and most recently in 2001, The Universe in a Nutshell. Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees, was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. 

Brave Hearts - Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven , 16 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most respected and influential composers of all time.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Electorate of Cologne, in 1770. Of the seven children born to Johann Beethoven, himself the only survivor of three, only second-born Ludwig and two younger brothers survived infancy. Beethoven's mother died on 17 July 1787, when Beethoven was 16.

Due to his father's worsening alcohol addiction, Beethoven became responsible for raising his two younger brothers. 

Around 1796, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. He suffered a severe form of  tinnitus, a "ringing" in his ears that made it hard for him to perceive and appreciate music; he also avoided conversationOver time, his hearing loss became profound: there is a well-attested story that, at the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience; hearing nothing, he began to weep.

Beethoven's hearing loss did not prevent his composing music, but it made concerts—lucrative sources of income—increasingly hard. Beethoven used a special rod attached to the soundboard on a piano that he could bite—the vibrations would then transfer from the piano to his jaw to increase his perception of the sound. A large collection of his hearing aids such as special ear horns can be viewed at the Beethoven House Museum in Bonn, Germany. Despite his obvious distress, however, Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until 1812. By 1814 however, Beethoven was almost totally deaf. A great Composer who proved that earthly obstacles can be overcome and produced everlasting Musical symphonies.