The Little Prince

Rating:
Summary: A Story for Every Age
Review: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is a wonderful story that relates to all ages. On the superficial level it is a great children's book that makes kids interested in reading and the great illustrations allow everyone to visualize what the author intended. For the adults a deeper meaning is found below the interesting level that reveals facts of "weird adults."

The way in which the characters are portrayed add so much to the story. Each of the many characters are described in great detail and the cute pictures just make you want to read on and on. The story is so true to life readers end with an uplifted view of life or an idea that a change to make their life more simple is needed. I recommend that everyone read this great little story to either themselves, their children, or their grandchildren. Everyone will appreciate The Little Prince.

Rating:
Summary: The Little Prince
Review: This is a children's book?

Perhaps. Maybe, as Saint Exupery implies, adults are too sophisticated, too wise, too adult, to understand the eloquent common sense about living a rational life. It takes some thought, insight and reason to comprehend the innate meaning. It's the ultimate 'take time to stop and smell the roses" book, which brings to mind an anecdote from 'Art and Fear' by David Batles and Ted Orland, quoting Howard Ikemoto:

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college -- that my job was to teach people how to draw.

"She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

The Little Prince is just as incredulous about many attitudes he encounters on Earth; on his travels, he keeps meeting adults who are wrapped up in their self-importance and egos. Surely, Saint Exupery understood the difference; his dedication was to "Leon Werth" in 1943 France, which he "corrected" to read, "To Leon Werth when he was a little boy."

It's a book of wonderful important things which children understand (it made me appreciate once again the importance of rotten crab apples) but which we set aside as adults. Children will understand it instinctively in their hearts . . . . . think of reading a few pages every night as a child falls asleep. Adults will love the allegories, and it will truly bring back memories of their own rag doll, or blankie (to use a term from Peanuts), or worn baseball glove, or even their own squishy soft rotten apples.

As adults, we are all familiar with advertising; but, how manjy of us realize that advertising is lies -- not in an absolute literal sense -- but because it emphasizes terrible destructive myths and untruths to us (Do things really go better with Coke?)

Written in 1943, when Adolf Hitler dominated much of Europe, the Little Prince meets an "absolute monarch" who tells him, "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution." In other words, absolute authority depends on being reasonable; unreasonable orders reflect a failure of the person giving the order, not a fault of anyone unable to carry out such an order.

"When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a litte from the truth," Saint Exupery writes. Balance that with an observation by Pablo Picasso, "Computers are useless -- all they can give you are answers."

In a world jammed with billions of facts and little or no understanding, this book is a reminder that a full and complete life is more than "the bottom line" of anything. Had I read it as a little boy, I don't think I'd have understood its wisdom; had I read it as an young adult, I don't think I'd have understood its wisdom; having at last read it, I hope I'm not to late to understand its wisdom.