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My name is Michael Fitzgerald, Sr. and I am an opportunist entrepreneur. Anywhere I saw an opportunity, I pursued it and built a business around it. Bootstrapping and constantly adapting to the surrounding environment helped build the business. Like many people my life started simple, but as my business developed, so did I. I have overcome many life-altering obstacles, and want to share my experiences with curious individuals who want to expand their minds and learn from someone else's life journey. Taking chances, making decisions and learning from my failures have helped me start many businesses which has lead me to success. Currently, I'm teaching and educating the next generation through leadership and example. I am mentoring my son, Michael Fitzgerald, II, and together we are building a socially conscience enterprise called MyCause Water. I hope that this account of my struggles and triumphs will help you overcome the obstacles in your life and inspire you to success.

Artists don't achieve financial success and critical acclaim during their lifetimes as a result of chance or luck. Michael FitzGerald's assiduously researched book documents Picasso's courting of dealers, critics, collectors, and curators as he established his reputation during the first forty years of the twentieth century. FitzGerald describes the care, patience, and resourcefulness invested by Paul Rosenberg, Picasso's dealer and close collaborator from 1918 to 1940, in building the financial value and public acceptance of Picasso's art. The book is based on and quotes generously from previously unpublished correspondence between Picasso and dealers, collectors, and museum curators.

'Do I look strange?'These were his last recorded words. That night Sosimo kissed his hands and laid them across his breast, knitting his fingers together like flowers. The next morning the household watched his coffin, held aloft by a dozen brown hands, disappear into an ocean of leaves. Every now and then, at a turn of the mountain, it would emerge from the trees, bobbing higher and higher, floating free.This remarkable debut novel tells of the last days of Tusitala, 'the teller of tales', as Robert Louis Stevenson became known in Samoa where he chose to die. In 1892 Girolamo Nerli travels from Sydney by steamer to Apia, with the intention of capturing something of Jekyll and Hyde in his portrait of the famous author. Nerli's presence sets in train a disturbing sequence of events. More than a century later, art historian Lewis Wakefield comes to Samoa to research the painting of Tusitala's portrait by the long-forgotten Italian artist. On hiatus from his bipolar medication, Lewis is freed to confront the powerful reality of all the desires and demons that R. L. Stevenson couldn't control. Lewis's personal journey is shadowed by the story of the lovable Teuila, a so-called fa'afafine ('in the manner of a woman'), and the spirit of Stevenson's servant boy, Sosimo. Set in an evocative tropical landscape haunted by the lives and spirits which drift across it, The Pacific Room is both a love letter to Samoa and a lush and tender exploration of artistic creation, of secret passions and merging dualities.

"Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald has made a lasting contribution to the Catholic Church, namely in the field of inter-religious dialogue, through his scholarship and through his functions at the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in the Vatican, as its Secretary and then President. This volume, which includes contributions by several scholars and friends of Archbishop Fitzgerald, focuses on three aspects: the theology of religions, the experience of dialogue and Muslim-Christian relations. Written by specialists, either in English or in French, these seventeen contributions help to understand the challenge of dialogue as it has been emphasised by the Second Vatican Council. Written from a scholarly perspective as well as from grassroots experiences, this volume also purports to show the diversity of approaches across the world."--Publisher's website.

Autism and Creativity is a stimulating study of male creativity and autism, arguing that a major genetic endowment is a prerequisite of genius, and that cultural and environmental factors are less significant than has often been claimed. Chapters on the diagnosis and psychology of autism set the scene for a detailed examination of a number of important historical figures. For example: * in the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, the classic traits of Asperger's syndrome are shown to have coexisted with an extraordinary level of creativity * more unexpectedly, from the fields of philosophy, politics and literature, scrutiny of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sir Keith Joseph, Eamon de Valera, Lewis Carroll and William Butler Yeats reveals classical autistic features. Autism and Creativity will prove fascinating reading not only for professionals and students in the field of autism and Asperger's syndrome, but for anyone wanting to know how individuals presenting autistic features have on many occasions changed the way we understand society.

How much of what exceptional people achieve can be put down to their own efforts and inner drive, and how much to fate? In this groundbreaking study, the authors argue that the extraordinary achievements of key figures in Irish history were indeed unstoppable - a product of their character and unique way of interacting with the world. In a series of fascinating character studies, Antoinette Walker and Michael Fitzgerald argue that many of those who were crucial to the development of Ireland's political, scientific and artistic traditions - the revolutionaries Robert Emmet, Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera; the scientist Robert Boyle, mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and ethnographer Daisy Bates; and the poet W. B. Yeats and writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett - would, if they were alive today, be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. The authors examine the character quirks that lead them to believe that all nine can be seen as 'Asperger geniuses'. They assert that this condition meant that all nine were virtually predestined to become exceptional figures in their chosen field and that, moreover, Asperger's syndrome can be seen as the key to genius in all ages and all cultures.

Scholars of Reconstruction have generally described Republican party factional conflicts in racial terms, as if the Radical agenda evoked unified black support. As Michael W. Fitzgerald shows in the first major study of black popular politics in the urban South in the years surrounding the Civil War, that depiction oversimplifies a contentious and often overlooked intraracial dynamic. Republican political power, he argues, heightened divisions within the African American community, divisions that were ultimately a major factor in the failure of Reconstruction. Focusing on Mobile, the Confederacy’s fourth largest city, Fitzgerald traces how the rivalry between longtime black residents and destitute freedmen fleeing the countryside yielded a startlingly antagonistic political scene. He demonstrates that the Republican factionalism that helped doom Reconstruction went beyond competing cliques of white officeholders. Boldly challenging reigning theories about the nature of post–Civil War politics, Urban Emancipation will spark historical debate for years to come.

During the last days of the Balkan War in the summer of 1995, Anthony, a hapless American questioning the dot–com values that allow him to live a pampered existence in San Francisco, agrees to join Gisela, a beauty he barely knows, in a search for her son, lost in a Hungarian orphanage. In Budapest they meet Marsh, a brilliant but frustrated British war correspondent. Anthony thinks he has found in Eastern Europe what his former life was missing: enterprising young people openly questioning U.S. values, determined to remake their own world. But when an odd and edgy love triangle emerges and he discovers his mission with Gisela is much darker than he imagined, Anthony is thrown further in flux. Moving from the tattered romanticism of Budapest, through the sparkling Dalmatian coast, and into the brutalized landscape of inland Croatia, the novel takes a shocking turn of irreversible consequence. Radiant Days is held taut in the voice of Anthony, whose desire to experience a more serious (and thrilling) life leaves injury in its wake. With a swift plot and seamless style, Michael FitzGerald delivers a story of unattainable love, misplaced lust, and the politics of compassion.

Reconstruction is one of the most complex, overlooked, and misunderstood periods of American history. The thirteen essays in this volume address the multiple struggles to make good on President Abraham Lincoln’s promise of a “new birth of freedom” in the years following the Civil War, as well as the counter-efforts including historiographical ones—to undermine those struggles. The forms these struggles took varied enormously, extended geographically beyond the former Confederacy, influenced political and racial thought internationally, and remain open to contestation even today. The fight to establish and maintain meaningful freedoms for America’s Black population led to the apparently concrete and permanent legal form of the three key Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as the revised state constitutions, but almost all of the latter were overturned by the end of the century, and even the former are not necessarily out of jeopardy. And it was not just the formerly enslaved who were gaining and losing freedoms. Struggles over freedom, citizenship, and rights can be seen in a variety of venues. At times, gaining one freedom might endanger another. How we remember Reconstruction and what we do with that memory continues to influence politics, especially the politics of race, in the contemporary United States. Offering analysis of educational and professional expansion, legal history, armed resistance, the fate of Black soldiers, international diplomacy post-1865 and much more, the essays collected here draw attention to some of the vital achievements of the Reconstruction period while reminding us that freedoms can be won, but they can also be lost.

During World War II, many deeply mysterious events took place in the fog and chaos of conflict. These were classified, hushed up and kept from the public eye, and yet with the recent opening of secret archives, new light has been shed on these strange circumstances. This brilliant book fills you in on these unsolved cases, teasing fact from fiction. Topics include: • The lost treasure of the Amber Room - a masterpiece made from 5,900 kg of amber which was supposedly spirited away to a secret location and never uncovered since. • The Man Who Never Was - a corpse dressed in military uniform, fitted out with fake documents who was deliberately allowed to fall into Nazi hands. His real identity is still disputed. • The murder of socialite and possible spy, Jane Horney. Her body was never discovered, and many believed she swapped identities with her friend and lookalike before her disappearance. Within these pages the reader will also discover the secrets of the Nazi Ghost Trains; the 17 British soldiers at Auschwitz; and 'the curse of Timur's Tomb'. These intriguing and often chilling conspiracies and subterfuges will leave you stunned.