Kate’s 2¢: “The Fortunate Pilgrim” by Mario Puzo

“The Fortunate Pilgrim” by Mario Puzo

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

Roy Avers did an excellent job of narrating this story for the National Library Service (NLS). His slight voice inflections gave you a heads-up about who was talking, but  not so much as to distract from the story and stop the flow.

   Puzo wielded his craft to perfection to bring to us the flavor of the times and the people in this family who lived through it in New York City.  There appears to be a lot of autobiography in this story.

From Wikipedia:

Personal life[edit]

Puzo was born in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City to Italian immigrants from Pietradefusi, Province of Avellino, Campania.[2] When Puzo was 12, his father, who worked as a trackman for the New York Central Railroad, was committed to the Pilgrim State Hospital insane asylum for schizophrenia,[3] and his wife, Maria, was left to raise their seven children.[4] He served in the US Army Air Forces in Germany in World War II, and later graduated from the City College of New York.[4] Puzo married a German woman, Erika, with whom he had five children.[5] When Erika died of breast cancer at the age of 58 in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became Puzo’s companion.[4][5]

Career[edit]

In 1950, his first short story, “The Last Christmas,” was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.[4]

In 1960, Bruce Jay Friedman hired Puzo as an assistant editor of a group of men’s pulp magazines with titles such as Male, Men. Under the pen name Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for magazine True Action.[6][7]

In 1969, Puzo’s best-known work, The Godfather, was published. Puzo stated that this story came from research into organized crime, not from personal experience, and that he was looking to write something that would appeal to the masses.[4][8] The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two years.[9] The book was later developed into the film The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures originally found out about Puzo’s novel in 1967 when a literary scout for the company contacted then Paramount Vice President of Production Peter Bart about Puzo’s unfinished sixty-page manuscript.[10] Bart believed the work was “much beyond a Mafia story” and offered Puzo a $12,500 option for the work, with an option for $80,000 if the finished work were made into a film.[10][11] Despite Puzo’s agent telling him to turn down the offer, Puzo was desperate for money and accepted the deal.[10][11] Paramount’s Robert Evans relates that, when they met in early 1968, he offered Puzo the $12,500 deal for the 60-page manuscript titled Mafia after the author confided in him that he urgently needed $10,000 to pay off gambling debts.[12] The film received three awards of the 11 Oscar category nominations, including Puzo’s Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Coppola and Puzo then collaborated on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990). Coppola and Puzo preferred the title The Death of Michael Corleone for the third film, but Paramount Pictures found that unacceptable.[13] In September 2020, for the film’s 30th anniversary, it was announced that a new cut of the film titled Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone would have a limited theatrical release in December 2020 followed by digital and Blu-ray.[14] Coppola said the film is the version he and Puzo had originally envisioned, and it “vindicates” its status among the trilogy.[15]

In mid-1972, Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, but he was unable to continue work because of his prior commitment to The Godfather Part II. Work continued on the script without his involvement, with writer George Fox (working on his first, and only, motion picture screenplay) and producer / director Mark Robson, who remained uncredited as a writer. Puzo retained screen credit in the completed film as a result of a quickly-settled lawsuit over story credit (most elements from his first draft made it into the final film), and Puzo’s name subsequently featured heavily in the advertising. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for Richard Donner’s Superman, which then also included the plot for Superman II, as they were originally written as one film. He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 film A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club.

In 1991, Puzo’s speculative fiction The Fourth K was published; it centres on a fictional member of the Kennedy family dynasty who becomes President of the United States early in the 2000s.[16]

Puzo never saw the publication of his penultimate book, Omertà, but the manuscript was finished before his death, as was the manuscript for The Family. However, in a review originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jules Siegel, who had worked closely with Puzo at Magazine Management Company, speculated that Omertà may have been completed by “some talentless hack”. Siegel also acknowledged the temptation to “rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis — that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible”.[17]

Death[edit]

Puzo died of heart failure on July 2, 1999, at his home in Bay Shore, New York, at the age of 78.[4]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

The fortunate pilgrim DB27612

Puzo, Mario Reading time: 9 hours, 15 minutes.

Roy Avers A production of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress.

Family

A chronicle of Italian immigrant life set in New York from the late twenties through World War II. Portrays the lives of the Angeluzzi-Corbo family, especially the luminous matriarch, Lucia Santa, twice-widowed and determined to preserve the family. Some strong language and some descriptions of sex.

Download The fortunate pilgrim DB27612

Kate’s 2¢: “Science and the modern world” by Alfred North Whitehead

“Science and the modern world” by Alfred North Whitehead

Kate’s 2¢: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as,     describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ merely shares my thoughts about what I read.  I’m just saying…

   A bit over my head and interest level, but it was intregging anyway.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947)

was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy,[21] which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.

In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century’s most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.[22]

Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of Western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another.[23] Today Whitehead’s philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.

Whitehead’s process philosophy argues that “there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us.”[23] For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead’s thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.[24][25]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Science and the modern world DB104024

Whitehead, Alfred North Reading time: 8 hours, 54 minutes.

Barry Bernson

Science and Technology

Collection of essays presented by mathematician and philosopher examining the influence of science on the thought of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, with material on relativity, the quantum theory, and the relation of religion to science. 1925.

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