Best of Classics: The Call of the Wild/The Godfather/The Time Machine
A classic story of survival from Jack London. Published in 1903 and widely regarded as his best work, The Call of the Wild is the story of a courageous dog, Buck, taken from pampered surroundings and shipped to the wilds of Alaska to be a sled dog. As Buck fights for survival, his primitive nature begins the wolf from whom his breed is descended.
A modern masterpiece, The Godfather, is a supercharged account of a family that uses guns, axes, and the psychology of fear to achieve dominance over the whole Mafia network in the United States. Still shocking more that a quarter century after it was first published, The Godfather is a modern classic presented here in an all-new listener's edition.
The time traveler embarks on an astonishing journey into the future. His time machine transports him to a far-distant dying world where humanity is divided into two classes: the graceful, idle Eloi who inhabit the idyllic surface of the world, and the Morlocks, ugly nocturnal creatures who live and work underground. In The Time Machine,Wells created one of the first and finest science fiction stories: a social allegory that is both vivid and perturbing.
-
Genres
1 pages, Audio Cassette
First published January 1,2000
This edition
- Format
-
1 pages, Audio Cassette
- Published
-
March 1, 2000 by Topics Entertainment
- ISBN
-
9781886089549
- ASIN
-
188608954X
- Language
-
English
About the author
At periods in the 1950s and early 1960s, Puzo worked as a writer/editor for publisher Martin Goodman's Magazine Management Company. Puzo, along with other writers like Bruce Jay Friedman, worked for the company line of men's magazines, pulp titles like Male, True Action, and Swank. Under the pseudonym Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for True Action.
Puzo's most famous work, The Godfather, was first published in 1969 after he had heard anecdotes about Mafia organizations during his time in pulp journalism. He later said in an interview with Larry King that his principal motivation was to make money. He had already, after all, written two books that had received great reviews, yet had not amounted to much. As a government clerk with five children, he was looking to write something that would appeal to the masses. With a number one bestseller for months on the New York Times Best Seller List, Mario Puzo had found his target audience. The book was later developed into the film The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The movie received 11 Academy Award nominations, winning three, including an Oscar for Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay. Coppola and Puzo collaborated then to work on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II and The Godfather Part III.
Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, which he was unable to continue working on due to his commitment to The Godfather Part II. Puzo also co-wrote Richard Donner's Superman and the original draft for Superman II. He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 film A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club.
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 acknowledges the temptation to "rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis -- that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible."
Puzo died of heart failure on July 2, 1999 at his home in Bay Shore, Long Island, New York. His family now lives in East Islip, New York.