Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $9.50 You Save: $7.50 (44%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Wind, Sand and Stars
Book Review: As lofty as flight itself
Summary: 3 Stars
First off, let me say that there were parts of this book that I thoroughly enjoyed. That truly transported me to another place. And for those moments alone, the book is worth reading.But as far as a consistently good read, it falls a bit short. The writing style is eloquent and high-minded, sometimes to the detriment of enjoyable reading. It seems as though he tried to pack so much meaing into every word that the words together almost seem to be too much.
But if you have the time and focus to read this book, there are great moments to be shared between the reader, the author and his subject.
Book Review: Beautiful content and style, a delightful find
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved The Little Prince, and thought that I would give Wind, Sand and Stars a try. Lucky for me that I did! A different kind of book than the children's-tale quality of The Little Prince, Wind, Sand and Stars is nevertheless magical in its own way. St-Exupery's ability to blend philosophy with his fairy-tale renditions of the life of a pilot are inspiring to more than one kind of person who seeks to reach the stars. Well worth reading, this book is a delight for anyone who seeks beauty in the written word.Book Review: "The true face of the earth"
Summary: 5 Stars
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;
Book Review: Aviator, Poet & Philosopher
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Few novels capture the poem that is life.
Summary: 5 Stars
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.