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Wind, Sand and Stars
by: Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 848.91209
EAN: 9780156027496
ISBN: 0156027496
Label: Harvest Books
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: December 09, 2002
Publisher: Harvest Books
Sales Rank: 36202
Studio: Harvest Books

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Recipient of the Grand Prix of the Académie Française, Wind, Sand and Stars captures the grandeur, danger, and isolation of flight. Its exciting account of air adventure, combined with lyrical prose and the spirit of a philosopher, makes it one of the most popular works ever written about flying. Translated by Lewis Galantière.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Timeless

I first read this book 45 years ago when flying was a dream for the future. Four plus decades and 3,500 hours of flying later the mastery of the author is still there.

Written in an era of open cockpit bi-planes the book captures the challenges of flying small planes in vast dark skies.

Highly recommended.

Rating:

- Flying is just the cover theme
Having just finished this book I feel compelled to write a review. This book is about more than flying and the adventures of the French Airmen of that era. This book is a flight into the author's views of self-fulfillment, discovery, and his opinions on humanity, specifically the willingness of certain individuals to sacrifice themselves for a cause. The author relates tales of near misses with disaster and the feelings of redemption and a renewed sense of appreciation for life. There are also times when he feels himself completely isolated from the world below since he is constantly teetering on the brink (naturally, flying was much more dangerous back then)
One theme that is constantly brought up by the author is the value of human relationships and the constant struggle to make them work. The only thing truly valuable we attain in life are hard-earned friendships, especially those that share a common ... Read More

Rating:

- "The physical drama cannot touch us until someone points out its spiritual sense."
Like many of his contemporaries, European aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944) was seeking the meaning of life in the post World War I world. He looked for it and often found it outside the bounds of quotidian existence. His job as a pilot for Aeropostale, the French air mail service, offered him a unique perspective as he encountered the elements up close and personal in small planes he guided over vast deserts, oceans and mountains, and through fog, storms and, in a memorable account, a cyclone. His survival depended upon a heightened awareness of nature's elements. His was a life lived large and he knew it; he pities the poor bureaucrat's confined existence; he pities even more the child who with the right "gardener" could become a prince or another Mozart but who is groomed rather to lead a circumscribed life.

His narrative never bogs as he connects the concrete elements of nature with ... Read More

Rating:

- Wisdom from an earlier generation
It is not exaggeration to say that the reading of four books--one of them "The Little Prince" by St. Exupery--changed my life. It would also not be an overstatement to say all my reading now is done to try to find another title or two to add to this list. (Maybe, though, the changing of my life is of little consequence. . .it slips away. . .it slips away. Maybe now I read to have another title to suggest to my children. They still, I hope, have much of life left. Let their changing begin.)

So, I suggest the "Wind Sand, and Stars" to them.
St. Exupery writes so convincingly of what the human spirit could achieve:
"To be a (man) is precisely, to be responsible. . .It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world."
and so devastatingly about what is has achieved:
". . .war is won by him who rots last--but in the end both rot together." ... Read More

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