Rating: 
Summary: Wind-swept Whimsy
Review: I'd been meaning to read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 1939 tale of his early flying days for many years. It's only a little book, some 120 pages long, and you can read it easily within a day. Overall, I sort of enjoyed it and the introduction by the English translator. (I read the new 1995 translation published by Penguin Paperbacks).
Antoine de Saint-Exupery was an aviation pioneer and he and his friends' many crash survivals are retold in lurid detail. There are tales of fantastic escapes following mountain-side crashes in the Andes. There is also lament for those free-spirited pioneers who never returned. Even so, I wouldn't say this is the classic that many have made it out to be. It's fairly entertaining. His earlier works are supposed to be better and more fluid and I'll give them a go at a later date.
But for now, the main problem I found with Wind, Sand and Stars is that it is more a collection of shorts inter-woven with Saint-Exupery's philosophical musings on life and death behind the joy-stick. As such, it isn't a tale that begins, gains momentum and races towards a final frenetic conclusion. It reads more like a series of diary entries with orders to the existential milkman thrown in between.
The biggest disappointment for me was the so-called classic account of his miraculous escape from the clutches of the sandy Libyan desert. Try as he might de Saint-Exupery's writing didn't inspire the same dry-mouthed anticipation made marvellous by Camus in his shorter works.
Overall, Wind, Sand and Stars is great for a lazy day in the garden when you want a bit of escapism. The world of de Saint-Exupery's, in his early pioneering days, was very different to the cushy world most of us inhabit. Where Saint-Exupery and friends risked life and limb heading off into mountainous terrain in little more than motorised kite, the biggest risk most of us ever take is deciding which stocks to buy to where to go on holiday. For this reason alone, I'd recommend giving Wind, Sand and Stars an afternoon's attention.
Three/four stars.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully written, full of meaning
Review: In Wind, Sand, and Stars, every word has its place, every sentence has its purpose. It is magical, utterly enjoyable, a triumph of the imagination. It is amazing how the book can capture your mind and heart so quickly and simply. In my opinion, the only book that outshines it is The Worst Journey in The World. It is fantastic. Read and enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: I loved it.
Review: It was sometimes slow, sometimes pretentious and not a very long book at all. I don't really know what I liked about it...
It's just one of those warm fuzzy feeling books i guess.
A view of the world from an author who loved life and felt pity for those who couldn't. He was a good story teller. He had a childish romantic view of the world which is part of the charm.
I think if you can't identify with him, then you won't like the story.
Rating:
Summary: What an experience!!!
Review: It's probably all been said before...! This is one of my favorite companion books, for the lessons of (sparce, but vital) comradery and (immense) courage are told in such a humbly personable way, I've felt many times like the Antoine was right here, speaking to me. It's incredible how a single cell of humanity in these desolate places becomes so blinding we can see hardly anything else... Such amazing times, these were!
Rating:
Summary: You will soar with him
Review: Just a wonderful book, well thought out wonderfully written. A book you will think about long after you have finished it.
Rating:
Summary: A fluffy masterpiece
Review: National Geographic magazine named "Wind, Sand and Stars" the third best adventure book of all time. If you like poetry, philosophy, and the elevated phraseology the French are good at you might agree. I'm more inclined to be interested in the who, what, when, and where of subjects and for me "Wind, Sand and Stars" is a bit long on fluff and scarce on hard information.
Saint-Exupery became a pilot in 1926 and this book is a description of his experiences during the next 10 years. He was a mail carrier in Europe, South America and the Sahara in the days when a pilot got his weather report by looking at the sky and found an airport by looking out the window. Flying in those days was truly a adventure and Saint-Exupery tells some exciting tales of storms in Patagonia and a crash in the desert of Libya. All of this is invested with metaphysical musings which would be mundane if he were not such a good writer.
Saint-Exupery disappeared during World War II while flying a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean. The wreckage of his plane was found in the sea near the southern coast of France in 1983.
As an alternative -- and more informative -- read to "Wind, Sand and Stars" I like Guy Murchie's "Song of the Sky."
Smallchief
Rating:
Summary: A classic of aviation and adventure literature
Review: Perhaps the translation was bad? After all, the book won a big prize in France. But for me the prose was pedestrian when not purple. The tone was basically puffery for being a pilot. This is the sort of book that would likely excite a schoolboy or girl who is full of romance for adventure. But not for the mature.
Rating: 
Summary: For adolescent romantics
Review: Perhaps the translation was bad? After all, the book won a big prize in France. But for me the prose was pedestrian when not purple. The tone was basically puffery for being a pilot. This is the sort of book that would likely excite a schoolboy or girl who is full of romance for adventure. But not for the mature.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond "Le Petit Prince"
Review: Saint Exupery lived a the kind of life that exceeded the writings of Ernest Hemingway, or the films of Howard Hawks. If you love, "The Little Prince", this book will expand your understanding. If you like stuff "Into Thin Air", or "The Perfect Storm", the true adventures of Saint-Ex were charting new territory literally, over fifty years ago.
Rating:
Summary: Aviator, Poet & Philosopher
Review: Saint-Exupery disappeared in North Africa in 1943 while flying reconnaissance flights for the American forces. After reading Wind, Sand and Stars one has a sense that this writer/philosopher, who is probably most well known for his fable The Little Prince, was well prepared for his life to end in this way. In the opening lines of the original French version Saint-Exupery writes:
"The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books.
Because it resists us. Man discovers himself when he measures
himself against the obstacle"
Wind, Sand and Stars is intensely autobiographical as it tells us of this man's adventures from his beginnings as a pilot with the air mail service over France, Spain and North Africa before World War I, through to his musings as an observer of the Spanish Civil War. But far more than an adventurer, Saint-Exupery writes like a poet and has the heart of a philosopher. This wonderful book (a credit to the translator from the original French) has incredibly rich descriptive passages in which he lays out for the reader the details observed in the natural world and the response that these evoke in his mind, heart and soul. In one section of the book (which a reader familiar with The Little Prince cannot help but conclude was inspirational for that work) Saint-Exupery describes at length his near-death experience after crashing in the Libyan desert, and wandering for days without water or hope:
"Apart from your suffering, I have no regrets. All in all, it has been
a good life. If I got free of this I should start right in again. A man
cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I
am not thinking of aviation. The aeroplane is a means, not an end.
One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs
for the sake of the plough. But the aeroplane is a means of getting
away from towns and their book-keeping and coming to grips with
reality."
Wind, Sand and Stars is not an easy read. But for those with patience and an interest (in a phrase from The Little Prince) in "listening with the heart", here is an insight to one man's struggle to understand and articulate the sacredness and greatness of human life.
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