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Summary: Poetic Pilot Philosopher
Review: St. Exupery's words beg you to drink them like hot tea. His language is as beautiful as the landscape it describes. I loved this book and the warm blanket effect it had on me: soothing and exciting at the same time. It is inspiring and adventurous, calming you in a strange way that makes your heart beat ever faster. A marvelous work of storytelling with dreamy poetic prose. This book will never be pushed out of the ruling position of its genre.
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Summary: "The true face of the earth"
Review: The essays and anecdotes in this volume are true gems to be enjoyed slowly, recalled fondly and shared often. Despite the relative infancy of the aviation industry at the time he composed them, Saint-Ex clearly understood that flying - especially the type of long and dangerous kind that he was engaged in - was both a metaphor and a brilliant illumination into the nature of the human condition. Like flying into uncharted territory, our journey through life is fraught with perils, faced mostly alone and with few witnesses to our acts of courage or cowardice. However, instead of facing up to this fact, Saint-Ex points out how "modern" culture consists of ever more elaborate denials of this basic fact: we have been indoctrinated with the goal of spending our lives working solely to achieve the most comfortable, painless, risk-free existence possible. And we continue to do so, much to our detriment. These essays are skillful and evocative arguments that! ! only when we face up to, and acknowledge our tenuous and perilous existence, can we truly appreciate what it means to be alive. Saint-Ex does a wonderful job in writing about what has become important to him: experiencing the majestic beauty and power of the earth and nature, what the existentialists would call "being authentic", and the friendship and cameraderie of the pilots and people he has met on his journeys. "Men travel side by side for years - each locked up in his own silence... till danger comes. Then they stand shoulder to shoulder. Then they discover they belong to the same family.... Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations... Each man must look to himself to learn the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded. These prison walls that the age of trade has built around us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more! ! , in response to our call, the chant of the human voice.&qu! ot;
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Summary: absolutely lovely
Review: This is a wonderful book.
The author is poetic as well as thoughtful and thought provoking.
Although this book was written a long time ago, it is still valid today. The thoughts and philosophy of the author truly apply to today. It also is just as exciting as if it were written yesterday.
Well worth every penny.
Truly a classic worth reading
Enjoy.
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Summary: Beautiful and thoughtful insight into a pilot's world
Review: This is quite a famous book and well received generally. The language is very poetical and the metaphors beautiful.
Besides being a thoughtful individual what struck me most about Exupery was his sensitivity to all around him. He has many perspicacious observations about humanity. The famous quote (paraphrased here).. love does not consist of looking at each other, but looking together in the same direction.. is from this book.
Many times the author's views are hard to comprehend..That might be due to the structuring of the writing or just inadequacy on my part!
Overall a very beautiful book opening up the brave world of early flying.
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Summary: Few novels capture the poem that is life.
Review: We usually assume that in order to appreciate literature we must read it in the original, but somehow St. Exupery translates as genuine poetry. This book, written in 1941, shortly before his disappearance, is an essential background text for both *The Little Prince* and *Night Flight.* St.Exupery is to the air what Joseph Conrad is to the sea: an explicator for a world that most of us never enter. As a pioneer aviator, St. Exupery experienced the "man confronts the elements" of nascent aviation; as a writer, he makes a gift those experiences, processed through the blender of his own intelligence and sensitivity, to the reader. *Wind, Sand and Stars* is not only about aviation; it's about life. "There are two hundred million men in Europe whose existence has no meaning and who yearn to come alive," St.Exupery writes. "Industry has torn them from the idiom of their peasant lineage and has locked them in those enormous ghettos that are like railway yards heaped with blackened trucks. Out of the depths of their slums these men yearn to be awakened." Are we so different today? The philosophy of *Wind, Sand and Stars* is as applicable now as it was then and, because it is philosophical, because the author not only perceives a different world but delves, analyzes it and divulges its meaning, the book remains a classic for the foreseeable future.
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Summary: read this book!
Review: What is truely remarkable about this book are two things : (a) It provides a vision for mankind which reconciles our need for progress with our (recent!) roots of self sufficiency, community and coexistence with nature. It is a vision desperately in need of voice in these doomed decades of the twighlight of the industrial age. The vision is one of courage to challenge the limits of our secure but meaningless lives and our tamed ambitions. The strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity, when we DARE to challenge ourselves to truely live our lives. Two passages stick out in my mind to illustrate this underlying theme. In the introduction to the text, Exupery recalls flying over the empty landscape of Argentina; each of the lights of the houses, he recalls, clung to the fragile earth, is a "miracle of consciousness". In the second, he describes his comrades' desperate five day walk to safety after crashing in the wilderness of Patagonia. On reaching safety he said, "no animal would have gone through what I have have been through" (paraphrase). A sentence which returned things to their true heirarchy, adds Exupery. A vision of man's ascendancy of the beast; a challenge to man to not live as caged animal in robot cities. (b) The other thing, of course, and more important perhaps, is the beauty of the prose. Full of pronouncements and insights (unlike any other book!) it still flows as a story, full of emotion. In particular in the desert scenes, each sentence transports you in time and space and impacts upon your every feeling. For sections of the book, page after page, each and every sentence has a resonance which brings waves euphoria and despair. To drink water, after reading the desert chapters, is to experience the joy of life!
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Summary: Fascinating - A Philosopher's Adventurer!
Review: When St Exupery's plane was found off of the coast of southern France this year, it was a melancholy triumph, one of those successes that leave us feeling hollow and sad. Why? Because it shatters the fantasy we were all content to have, that he flew off into the sunset and oblivion, and left this world altogether? Perhaps, but more than that, it offers a sad reminder that we cannot, in the end, overcome the mundane reality of death by loving life so much.
Books, however, are not people, and they can acheive this feat, even if their authors cannot. Wind Sand and Stars is a book that deserves just this fate. It is a vital document of life - and the strugles of any one insignifican human in the vast desert of humanity.
Not everyone likes this book, and that is their right, but I would go ahead and recomend it to anyone. Criticisms of this book that I have seen come primarily from two sources: Adults who thought it was too childish, and children who thought it was too adult. An odd mix, isn't it? To address the later, it is not a childrens book. Many read the Little Prince, and like it so much that they want to find other books by the same author. Unfotunately St Exupery spends a lot of time celebrating the mundane, something most children haven't cultivated the patience for in literature. However, it's themes are not too mature for a child, and it would be great for a parent to read to their children, where verbal story-telling could make up for where the prose might lag.
The other criticism I have heard is that this book is juvenile and romantic. I for one don't see these as faults to the book, but as virtues. I have done some extraordinary things in my life, and it is largely because I have the peculiar juvenile idiocy to not know better than to give up. Romanticism and dreaming are not as counter productive as some people think.
But what is more, I think anyone who writes off this book as a work of juvenile adventure, and light-weight romanticism is missing the greater point. The Little Prince has been so successfull because it is much more than a childrens book, and Wind Sand and Stars is similarly much more than an adventure memoir. Compare it, for instance, as a friend of mine did, to My Life as an Adventurer by Sven Anders Hedin. Hedin no doubt had some amazing adventures, but he simply narates his extraordinary adventures without any emotional inflection just like he was giving a resume or driving directions on the highway. St Exupery is the polar oposite of this: he carefully ponders every facet of his experience, whether it is rain falling on the bus carrying him to the airstrip, or a desert so imense that it is universe in and of itself.
He infuses everything he sees with his own soul. Nothing is mundane for St Exupery. Blades of grass, unnamed streams, stars millions of miles away all take on personalities of their own and are given a unique introduction by one of the best writers of the Twentieth century. Perhaps this is juvenile - juvenile in the sense that it is this same kind of imagination and bouyance that allows children to have amazing adventure exploring their own back yard. I believe that it is also this passion for the world around us that allows children to learn at a pace that far outstrips even the most inteligent adults.
To think of this book, though, as all light-spirited adventure, though, is also a mistake. Although St Exupery has an amazing sense of curiosity and imagination, he was a very complex and realistic man. Adventure is itself a very dark human undertaking. To cast oneself out of the comfortable world of the known in a constant search for something more, something beyond takes the kind of anxious discontent that breeds many of the best writers and adventurers, but also kills them.
No human is uncomplicated, least of all adventurers and writers. St Exupery was both. For me, his writting is infused with a restless longing, and a mournfull tinge of sorrow at beeing bound to our increasingly desperate world. That is also what makes the joys he finds so seet: the contrast. A soft life breed malaise, a bitter life breeds ecstacy. Although it is not for all, I feel driven to follow St Exupery's path: to push the dark boundries of our world, even if they are just in our mind.
This internal adventure, more than any daring escapade, is what makes St Exupery a Philosopher's Adventurer.
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