oh... maybe I'm just a sucker for Saint-Exupéry. Let me go on about the title. It just doesn't translate into English. I LIKE the traditional English title, Wind, Sand, and Stars, but the puns all get lost. They'd get lost no mattr how you translate it, though. In French, la terre is not just the world, the earth, but also earth, dirt, ground and land; there are puns on terrain--terraine, landscape--and territoire, territory--the word atterrir, TO LAND an aeroplane, literally means to alight on

I have no regrets. I have gambled and lost. It was all in the day's work. At least I have had the unforgettable taste of the sea on my lips.*Of course I know it is a mirage! Am I the sort of man who can be fooled? But what if I want to go after that mirage? Suppose I enjoy indulging my hope? Suppose it suits me to love that crenelated town all beflagged with sunlight? What if I choose to walk straight ahead on light feet - for you must know that I have dropped my weariness behind me, I am happy

This book was fantastic, literally...almost hard to believe that its is the author's real life. Crashing in the Lybian desert, life in the Sahara, looking for a lost friend in the snows of the Chilean Andes, and first-hand accounts of the Spanish Civil War. But most of all, it is a poetic book about the beauty of flying, connection with nature, how challenge and suffering turn the boy into the man, how meaningful bonds between humans form, the contrast between the comfortable life of a bookkeepe...

Whenever I am forced to name my most favorite book ever, my automatic response is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince. I read it first when I was a boy but I did not understand what was it all about except the hat with an elephant inside and the planet with big trees called baobab. The second time was in college when it was a required reading in World Literature. I did not really like it until my professor explained that the novel was about man’s search for friendship. I recall that the...

This book is in many ways a wonderful background book for The Little Prince. The non-fiction stories of the author's adventures as a pilot allowed me to see the man behind one of my all time favorite books. The Little Prince is one of those books where you can sense the soul of the author and Saint-Exupéry's non-fiction books, like this one, let you see that your initial intuition while reading The Little Prince was correct. This is a very un-sentimental look at courage and at the urge we all ha...

Saint-Exupery's talent as a writer and beauty as a human being shine bright as desert stars in this brief, stunning memoir of his flying adventures. I am so glad that I finally got around to reading it, as it's been on my shelf for years. Highly recommend.

Very inspirational book that looks at flight from two very different perspectives: physical flight in a plane and spiritual flight from inside.

I purchased this book from the Folio Society on 8 January 1993 (I have this rather annoying habit of stating in my books when and where I purchased them. Just a quirk that I have.)I was a member of this book club and just liked the look of the cover and in my stupidity I thought that it would just be about the desert (that I love),the wind and stars. I had no idea that this French aristrocrat, writer, poet and author of the "Le Petit Prince" was a pilot.I must confess that initially I thought it...

This short memoir for me was a wonderful adventure in flying and parallel inward journey by the author. That puts this book on an honored shelf with Mathiessen’s “The Snow Leopard”. St. Expery’s experiences in the 20’s with the French airmail service to North Africa and South America had comparable mind altering impacts and serious humbling in the face of nature’s powers. But instead of a serious quest and a single journey, we get a more open-ended set of stories bound to his flying career and p...

I read a different version of the book from the one listed, but the one I was given has a different translator and is in many ways a different book. I write the review here as the book I read I have been unable to find here or on Amazon, and this seems therefore the best place to put my review. The book I am reviewing is ISBN 978 0 9559036-6-3, translated by John Watkinson and published in 2017. I make so much of this being a different version as this is a book with a complex past. It is based o...

I know nothing, nothing in the world, equal to the wonder of nightfall in the air. [...] Mermoz said once, “It’s worth it, it’s worth the final smash-up.” Flying in 2015 has become about as commonplace and unexciting as taking the subway to work or the train to the weekend lodge. It is safer than driving a car and most of the work, beside take-offs and landings, is done by sophisticated instruments. What we have gained in safety and comfort. We may have lost in our sense of wonder and our persp

The steadily growing stream of birth and marriage announcements on my Facebook feed has led me to rethink these “steps” that most people take each passing year. I used to think (and still sometimes do when I’m feeling unsure or cynical) that this seemingly prewritten way of living, of societal norms pushing us forward, was depressing evidence for a lack of creativity. But lately I see these steps not as predetermined chains on a pair of manacles we never knew we were wearing, but as a climb up a...

Antoine de Saint-Exupery is one of the most brilliant humanist-writers. Every person is beautiful in their own way, each of us need to be open and forward in the right direction. "Human Planet," a great book, infinitely good and exciting. It exalted honor, friendship, kindness, helping others. We see how beautiful our planet is. But not only the nature of the world is worthy of attention and admiration - do not forget about the people.Exupery does not stop to admire the beauty of our planet, san...

The only book I have ever read by de Saint-Exupery is (and this will come as no surprise) The Little Prince. I even had to read the original French version while in college. I don't know much about the author, but when I saw a review for this book, it intrigued me.I am glad I read it. This is full of great writing of de Saint-Exupery's life as a pilot delivering mail for Aeropostale. I originally picked it up to skim and determine if it would be my next read, but I was so taken by the passages t...

If I had to choose between The Little Prince and this book, I'd choose this book, because in a way you can use it to derive Saint-Exupéry's classic. If The Little Prince is the diamond, this book is the coal: a hard-earned mass of adventure and experience. The book reads like a long letter from your most astonishing friend. Sublime.

I find that reading books about plane crashes while physically in a plane really enhances the flying experience. I told my mother that and she thought I was being facetious, but I was just being honest. I read Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (author of The Little Prince) on the way to Michigan and Wind, Sand, and Stars by the same author on the way back, both of which include plane disasters. Both were exquisite, though not at all in the same way as The Little Prince, and both are about...

Transcendant, beautiful, embracing. When I read three books in a row where this book featured prominently (The Goldfinch was one) I felt the book calling to me. For me, it was not the type of book that I could sit down and read in one go. I wanted to mull and linger on the words, and to embrace St Exupery's words demands a kind of internal honesty and emotionality from the reader that can be freeing but also emotionally exhausting. I think that is why I put it down so often. I mean, I started th...

I wanted to rate this higher, I really did. A beautiful beginning and brilliant end were dragged down by a long, overwritten section in north Africa dripping will ill-disguised French Colonial contempt for the people there.But let's get back to that beautiful beginning. I first heard of this book as a child, where a portion of it was anthologized in a book I had (details here). It described a flight he took to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, a cold, foggy volcanic lands...

"I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light...