Wind, Sand And Stars

By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

From the author of the beloved classic The Little Prince and a winner 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780547546728

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), born in Lyons, France, is one of the world’s best loved and widest read writers. His timeless fable, The Little Prince, has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into nearly every language. His pilot’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, won the National Book Award and was named the #1 adventure book of all time by Outside magazine and was ranked #3 on National Geographic Adventure’s list of all-time-best exploration books. His other books include Night Flight; Southern Mail; and Airman's Odyssey. A pilot at twenty-six, he was a pioneer of commercial aviation and flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean.  Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Book preview

Copyright 1939 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Copyright renewed 1967 by Lewis Galantière

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944.

[Terre des hommes. English]

Wind, sand and stars/Antoine de Saint-Exupéry translated from the French by Lewis Galantière

p. cm.—(A Harcourt Brace modern classic)

Translation of: Terre des hommes.

ISBN 0-15-197087-4

1. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 1900–1944—Biography. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography. 3. Air pilots—France—Biography.

I. Title. II. Series.

PQ2637.A274Z513 1992

848'.91209—dc20 91-45986

eISBN 978-0-547-54672-8

v4.0918

A French aviator who followed the profession of airline pilot for eight years offers the American edition of this book in homage to the airline pilots of America and their dead.

I

The Craft

In 1926 I was enrolled as student airline pilot by the Latécoère Company, the predecessors of Aéropostale (now Air France) in the operation of the line between Toulouse, in southwestern France, and Dakar, in French West Africa. I was learning the craft, undergoing an apprenticeship served by all young pilots before they were allowed to carry the mails. We took ships up on trial spins, made meek little hops between Toulouse and Perpignan, and had dreary lessons in meteorology in a freezing hangar. We lived in fear of the mountains of Spain, over which we had yet to fly, and in awe of our elders.

These veterans were to be seen in the field restaurant—gruff, not particularly approachable, and inclined somewhat to condescension when giving us the benefit of their experience. When one of them landed, rain-soaked and behind schedule, from Alicante or Casablanca, and one of us asked humble questions about his flight, the very curtness of his replies on these tempestuous days was matter enough out of which to build a fabulous world filled with snares and pitfalls, with cliffs suddenly looming out of fog and whirling air-currents of a strength to uproot cedars. Black dragons guarded the mouths of the valleys and clusters of lightning crowned the crests—for our elders were always at some pains to feed our reverence. But from time to time one or another of them, eternally to be revered, would fail to come back.

I remember, once, a homecoming of Bury, he who was later to die in a spur of the Pyrenees. He came into the restaurant, sat down at the common table, and went stolidly at his food, shoulders still bowed by the fatigue of his recent trial. It was at the end of one of those foul days when from end to end of the line the skies are filled with dirty weather, when the mountains seem to a pilot to be wallowing in slime like exploded cannon on the decks of an antique man-o’-war.

I stared at Bury, swallowed my saliva, and ventured after a bit to ask if he had had a hard flight. Bury, bent over his plate in frowning absorption, could not hear me. In those days we flew open ships and thrust our heads out round the windshield, in bad weather, to take our bearings: the wind that whistled in our ears was a long time clearing out of our heads. Finally Bury looked up, seemed to understand me, to think back to what I was referring to, and suddenly he gave a bright laugh. This brief burst of laughter, from a man who laughed little, startled me. For a moment his weary being was bright with it. But he spoke no word, lowered his head, and went on chewing in silence. And in that dismal restaurant, surrounded by the simple government clerks who sat there repairing the wear and tear of their humble daily tasks, my broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon.

The night came when it was my turn to be called to the field manager’s room.

He said: You leave tomorrow.

I stood motionless, waiting for him to dismiss me. After a moment of silence he added:

I take it you know the regulations?

In those days the motor was not what it is today. It would drop out, for example, without warning and with a great rattle like the crash of crockery. And one would simply throw in one’s hand: there was no hope of refuge on the rocky crust of Spain. Here, we used to say, when your motor goes, your ship goes, too.

An airplane, of course, can be replaced. Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning:

Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but—

And I was struck by the graphic image:

But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity.

And suddenly that tranquil cloud-world, that world so harmless and simple that one sees below on rising out of the clouds, took on in my eyes a new quality. That peaceful world became a pitfall. I imagined the immense white pitfall spread beneath me. Below it reigned not what one might think—not the agitation of men, not the living tumult and bustle of cities, but a silence even more absolute than in the clouds, a peace even more final. This viscous whiteness became in my mind the frontier between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. Already I was beginning to realize that a spectacle has no meaning except it be seen through the glass of a culture, a civilization, a craft. Mountaineers too know the sea of clouds, yet it does not seem to them the fabulous curtain it is to me.

When I left that room I was filled with a childish pride. Now it was my turn to take on at dawn the responsibility of a cargo of passengers and the African mails. But at the same time I felt very meek. I felt myself ill-prepared for this responsibility. Spain was poor in emergency fields; we had no radio; and I was troubled lest when I got into difficulty I should not know where to hunt a landing-place. Staring at the aridity of my maps, I could see no help in them; and so, with a heart full of shyness and pride, I fled to spend this night of vigil with my friend Guillaumet. Guillaumet had been over the route before me. He knew all the dodges by which one got hold of the keys to Spain. I should have to be initiated by Guillaumet.

When I walked in he looked up and smiled.

I know all about it, he said. How do you feel?

He went to a cupboard and came back with glasses and a bottle of port, still smiling.

We’ll drink to it. Don’t worry. It’s easier than you think.

Guillaumet exuded confidence the way a lamp gives off light. He was himself later on to break the record for postal crossings in the Andes and the South Atlantic. On this night, sitting in his shirtsleeves, his arms folded in the lamplight, smiling the most heartening of smiles, he said to me simply:

You’ll be bothered from time to time by storms, fog, snow. When you are, think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’

I spread out my maps and asked him hesitantly if he would mind going over the hop with me. And there, bent over in the lamplight, shoulder to shoulder with the veteran, I felt a sort of schoolboy peace.

But what a strange lesson in geography I was given! Guillaumet did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend. He did not talk about provinces, or peoples, or livestock. Instead of telling me about Guadix, he spoke of three orange-trees on the edge of the town: Beware of those trees. Better mark them on the map. And those three orange-trees seemed to me thenceforth higher than the Sierra Nevada.

He did not talk about Lorca, but about a humble farm near Lorca, a living farm with its farmer and the farmer’s wife. And this tiny, this remote couple, living a thousand miles from where we sat, took on a universal importance. Settled on the slope of a mountain, they watched like lighthouse-keepers beneath the stars, ever on the lookout to succor men.

The details that we drew up from oblivion, from their inconceivable remoteness, no geographer had been concerned to explore. Because it washed the banks of great cities, the Ebro River was of interest to map-makers. But what had they to do with that brook running secretly through the water-weeds to the west of Motril, that brook nourishing a mere score or two of flowers?

Careful of that brook: it breaks up the whole field. Mark it on your map. Ah, I was to remember that serpent in the grass near Motril! It looked like nothing at all, and its faint murmur sang to no more than a few frogs; but it slept with one eye open. Stretching its length along the grasses in the paradise of that emergency landing-field, it lay in wait for me a thousand miles from where I sat. Given the chance, it would transform me into a flaming candelabra. And those thirty valorous sheep ready to charge me on the slope of a hill! Now that I knew about them I could brace myself to meet them.

You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels. An astounded smile was all I could summon in the face of so cruel a threat.

Little by little, under the lamp, the Spain of my map became a sort of fairyland. The crosses I marked to indicate safety zones and traps were so many buoys and beacons. I charted the farmer, the thirty sheep, the brook. And, exactly where she stood, I set a buoy to mark the shepherdess forgotten by the geographers.

When I left Guillaumet on that freezing winter night, I felt the need of a brisk walk. I turned up my coat collar, and as I strode among the indifferent passers-by I was escorting a fervor as tender as if I had just fallen in love. To be brushing past these strangers with that marvelous secret in my heart filled me with pride. I seemed to myself a sentinel standing guard over a sleeping camp. These passers-by knew nothing about me, yet it was to me that, in their mail pouches, they were about to confide the weightiest cares of their hearts and their trade. Into my hands were they about to entrust their hopes. And I, muffled up in my cloak, walked among them like a shepherd, though they were unaware of my solicitude.

Nor were they receiving any of those messages now being despatched to me by the night. For this snowstorm that was gathering, and that was to burden my first flight, concerned my frail flesh, not theirs. What could they know of those stars that one by one were going out? I alone was in the confidence of the stars. To me alone news was being sent of the enemy’s position before the hour of battle. My footfall rang in a universe that was not theirs.

These messages of such grave concern were reaching me as I walked between rows of lighted shop-windows, and those windows on that night seemed a display of all that was good on earth, of a paradise of sweet things. In the sight of all this happiness, I tasted the proud intoxication of renunciation. I was a warrior in danger. What meaning could they have for me, these flashing crystals meant for men’s festivities, these lamps whose glow was to shelter men’s meditations, these cozy furs out of which were to emerge pathetically beautiful solicitous faces? I was still wrapped in the aura of friendship, dazed a little like a child on Christmas Eve, expectant of surprise and palpitatingly prepared for happiness; and yet already I was soaked in spray; a mail pilot, I was already nibbling the bitter pulp of night flight.

It was three in the morning when they woke me. I thrust the shutters open with a dry snap, saw that rain was falling on the town, and got soberly into my harness. A half-hour later I was out on the pavement shining with rain, sitting on my little valise and waiting for the bus that was to pick me up. So many other flyers before me, on their day of ordination, had undergone this humble wait with beating heart.

Finally I saw the old-fashioned vehicle come round the corner and heard its tinny rattle. Like those who had gone before me, I squeezed in between a sleepy customs guard and a few glum government clerks. The bus smelled musty, smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand. It stopped every five hundred yards to take on another scrivener, another guard, another inspector.

Those in the bus who had already gone back to sleep responded with a vague grunt to the greeting of the newcomer, while he crowded in as well as he was able and instantly fell asleep himself. We jolted mournfully over the uneven pavements of Toulouse, I in the midst of these men who in the rain and the breaking day were about to take up again their dreary diurnal tasks, their red tape, their monotonous lives.

Morning after morning, greeted by the growl of the customs guard shaken out of sleep by his arrival, by the gruff irritability of clerk or inspector, one mail pilot or another got into this bus and was for the moment indistinguishable from these bureaucrats. But as the street lamps moved by, as the field drew nearer and nearer, the old omnibus rattling along lost little by little its reality and became a grey chrysalis from which one emerged transfigured.

Morning after morning a flyer sat here and felt of a sudden, somewhere inside the vulnerable man subjected to his neighbor’s surliness, the stirring of the pilot of the Spanish and African mails, the birth of him who, three hours later, was to confront in the lightnings the dragon of the mountains; and who, four hours afterwards, having vanquished it, would be free to decide between a detour over the sea and a direct assault upon the Alcoy range, would be free to deal with storm, with mountain, with ocean.

And thus every morning each pilot before me, in his time, had been lost in the anonymity of daybreak beneath the dismal winter sky of Toulouse, and each one, transfigured by this old omnibus, had felt the birth within him of the sovereign who, five hours later, leaving behind him the rains and snows of the North, repudiating winter, had throttled down his motor and begun to drift earthward in the summer air beneath the shining sun of Alicante.

The old omnibus has vanished, but its austerity, its discomfort, still live in my memory. It was a proper symbol of the apprenticeship we had to serve before we might possess the stern joys of our craft. Everything about it was intensely serious. I remember three years later, though hardly ten words were spoken, learning in that bus of the death of Lécrivain, one of those hundred pilots who on a day or a night of fog have retired for eternity.

It was four in the morning, and the same silence was abroad when we heard the field manager, invisible in the darkness, address the inspector:

Lécrivain didn’t land at Casablanca last night.

Ah! said the inspector. Ah?

Torn from his dream he made an effort to wake up, to display his zeal, and added:

Is that so? Couldn’t he get through? Did he come back?

And in the dead darkness of the omnibus the answer came: No.

We waited to hear the rest, but no word sounded. And as the seconds fell it became more and more evident that that no would be followed by no further word, was eternal and without appeal, that Lécrivain not only had not landed at Casablanca but would never again land anywhere.

And so, at daybreak on the morning of my first flight with the mails, I went through the sacred rites of the craft, and I felt the self-confidence oozing out of me as I stared through the windows at the macadam shining and reflecting back the street lights. Over the pools of water I could see great palms of wind running. And I thought: My first flight with the mails! Really, this is not my lucky day.

I raised my eyes and looked at the inspector. Would you call this bad weather? I asked.

He threw a weary glance out of the window. Doesn’t prove anything, he growled finally.

And I wondered how one could tell bad weather. The night before, with a single smile Guillaumet had wiped out all the evil omens with which the veterans overwhelmed us, but they came back into my memory. I feel sorry for the man who doesn’t know the whole line pebble by pebble, if he runs into a snowstorm. Oh, yes, I pity the fellow. Our elders, who had their prestige to think of, had all bobbed their heads solemnly and looked at us with embarrassing sympathy, as if they were pitying a flock of condemned sheep.

For how many of us had this old omnibus served as refuge in its day? Sixty? Eighty? I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. How many of us had they escorted through the rain on a journey from which there was no coming back?

I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.

Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the

Reviews for Wind, Sand And Stars

[joe73-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Human spirit. What is it? What is made of and what makes it flourish? In this short volume those questions are answered by the author. Our desire to be, live and strive. A read that is well worth it, takes us across the skies, through the sand and at times other places none of us ever want to be. I read a translation of the novel from the French and it kind of sticks in my craw. The author describes in vivid detail the life of a pilot in the French Mail service…the good, the bad and the very ugly. To know and feel not only his experience (which is harrowing) but to know that he devoted so many of his thoughts to those around him whose suffering and bedraggled lives did as well. I guess the icing on the cake of this novel is knowing how the author met his fate after describing the manner in which several of his peers met theirs. In a sense you get the feeling that he knows it is just a matter of time until he falls from the sky only to vanish forever. Inspirational and uplifting. Well worth the read. I do suggest that if one is drawn to books like this… The Worst Journey in the World… About the Ill-fated Terra Nova expedition. A longer and punchier book but a credit to the genre as well.

[jhemlock-1711 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Human spirit. What is it? What is made of and what makes it flourish? In this short volume those questions are answered by the author. Our desire to be, live and strive. A read that is well worth it, takes us across the skies, through the sand and at times other places none of us ever want to be. I read a translation of the novel from the French and it kind of sticks in my craw. The author describes in vivid detail the life of a pilot in the French Mail service…the good, the bad and the very ugly. To know and feel not only his experience (which is harrowing) but to know that he devoted so many of his thoughts to those around him whose suffering and bedraggled lives did as well. I guess the icing on the cake of this novel is knowing how the author met his fate after describing the manner in which several of his peers met theirs. In a sense you get the feeling that he knows it is just a matter of time until he falls from the sky only to vanish forever. Inspirational and uplifting. Well worth the read. I do suggest that if one is drawn to books like this… The Worst Journey in the World… About the Ill-fated Terra Nova expedition. A longer and punchier book but a credit to the genre as well.

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These are autobiographical essays based mostly on his experiences as a mail pilot for Aéropostale in Africa and South America, and one chapter about the Spanish Civil War. It’s good.One of my favorite comic literary devices is the secret, insulting dinner party game:"When I was a child my sisters had a way of giving marks to guests who were honoring our table for the first time. Conversation might languish for a moment, and then in the silence we could hear the sudden impact of 'Sixty!'--a word that could tickle only the family, who knew that one hundred was par. Branded by this low mark, the guest would all unknowing continue to spend himself in little courtesies while we sat screaming inwardly with delight."This brings to mind a bit that shows up in a Louis Auchincloss novel, I don’t recall which (revealed in one of his memoirs to be based on real-life): some regulars on the society dinner party circuit started selling “bore insurance” to their friends that would pay cash if you had the misfortune of being seated next one of the notoriously soporific chowderheads that could otherwise ruin your evening. They kept a list ranking them and assigning payouts.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This biography takes us on an adventure through the exhilarating early days of aviation. It is filled with tales of escapades, of both the author and his contemporaries. We hear of crashes in the desert, and in the snow-bound mountains, remote from habitation, where shear grit and endurance have been the difference between making it through and death from the elements, starvation, freezing or thirst. We hear of raids on remote outposts by warring tribes, of the rescue of a slave from the captivity of Arabs, of duty to save the post from perishing with the plane, and the physical battle between man and the weather when the machine he is flying is shaking itself to pieces and the controls of the plane become an extension to his being.Woven throughout these cinematic and thrilling scenarios we have true insight on the human condition, its varieties, and its reaction to extreme situations. This is a truly humanist work from a highly sensitive yet resilient author, whose appreciation of the poetry of nature and human existence is suitably reflected in his skill at writing. This is a fine literary biography of much aesthetic value, and filled with so much excitement and suspense that when the still reflective moments come they are even better. There is so much to like about this book that I would recommend it to most readers.

[grace.van.moer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reread. Crazy tales of early aviation in unmapped areas. Example - flying the mail over the Andes from Brazil to Peru.

[jon1lambert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The older I get the more I like the touch, feel and look of old books. A particular favourite type is the Gallimard paperback from the post war period. In an Oxfam bookshop I found a copy of Saint-Exupery’s Terre des Hommes with page browning and signs of sellotape on the front cover. It is from the ‘trois cent vingtieme edition’ printed in 1949, ten years after the first edition. It is so fragile that it crumbles at a turn of the page. I like the way French publishers draw attention to the various limited editions on special paper, for instance ‘L’edition originale de cet ouvrage a ete tiree a cent soixante-trois exemplaires’ before describing a breakdown of these volumes by ‘papier Whatman’, ‘velin de Hollande’ and 30 copies ‘sur velin pur fil des papeteries Lafuma Navarre’. My copy has no claim to fame in itself. The content is marvellous of course and starts with a statement that rings true however it may be applied.‘La terre nous apprend plus long sur nous que tous les livres. Parce qu’elle nous resiste. L’homme se découvre quand il se mesure avec l’obstacle. Mais, pour l’atteindre, il lui faut un outil’ (page 9).I encountered this challenge when my tool, my car, struck an object that burst a tire, leaving me stranded in gathering darkness miles from home. As I awaited help dusk turned to darkness and the natural environment made its presence felt through the sounds of animals, a barking fox, the bellow of cows and the soulful cry of the tawny owl. Trees, hedges and fields took on different shapes and characteristics. Long periods of silence took over and emphasised my isolation and helplessness in a rural landscape. Four lines into Terre des Homme, I am hooked.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes the early years of regular powered flight as he worked with the Aéropostale (later Air France) delivering the mail. He talks of the almost-mystical manner in which pilots related to the world from their lofty perch and how they had to view the land beneath them both to find their way and to successfully land in case of emergency. He writes, “Flying is a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries. A pilot’s business is with the wind, with the stars, with night, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares in expectancy for the coming of dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars” (pg. 147). Beyond the short vignettes about the lives of pilots and the handling of aircraft, Saint-Exupéry spends a great deal of time discussing his experiences in what is now Algeria and Morocco, his crash in the Sahara Desert, and his experiences at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.Discussing his crash in the Sahara, Saint-Exupéry discussing following the trail of a fennec fox while he was hallucinating due to dehydration. This experience likely served as the inspiration for his later novella, Le Petit Prince (pg. 136). Further, he infuses his reminiscences with a humanist/poetic outlook, much like the musings of the fox in Le Petit Prince. Saint-Exupéry writes, “Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded. These prison walls that this age of trade has built up round 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 pathetic chant of the human voice” (pg. 26). He continues, “When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger – only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth” (pg. 28). These introspective passages contribute to the generally romantic view of early pilots during the interwar years. This book, with lovely illustrations from Linda Kitson, will appeal to anyone interested in the history of aviation.

[coffeehag · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are many adventure stories in the world. Then, one runs across a narrative that reduces the lines of syntax in all other tales of adventure to the level of a boy ensuring that his stuffed animals are arranged comfortably before running off to play. This is such a book. And it is not merely a work of fiction, spun to entertain. It is a memoir. Saint-Exupery, while giving expression to the inexpressibility of his experiences, proceeds to express them anyway, with an unparalleled ability to evoke a picture in the mind of the reader.

[viking2917_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I rated every book by the frequency with which I highlight or dogear passages, this book would surely be at or near the top. A lot of deep thinking, some amazing adventures, and some wonderful writing. "and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom. Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid."

[kcshankd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've an ancestor in Arlington National Cemetery that flew above France during WWI, having traversed the globe from his tiny Kansas horse and buggy town. I was hoping this book would bring him closer. I was blown away reading _Sagittarius Rising_ some years ago, and this is not that. It is more philosophical, less memoir - written by an older man looking back. There are chapters that clang against modern sensibilities, despite the wonder of the early long distance pilot. I am glad I read it to cross it off my list, but would not recommend the book to a modern reader.

[daniel5estes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

On the surface, Wind, Sand and Stars is about flight when flying was in its infancy. To move across the Earth as the bird flies required a new kind of observational awareness. The coming decades would see this awareness more or less replaced with mechanized instruments, but early on the brunt of the physical and mental effort was the sole responsibility of the pilot. So, on the surface, this is what the book is about. A careful reader however will appreciate that it's about so much more.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

More writings about the early days of aviation. Rather thrilling stuff.

[untraveller · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Horrible book. I'm not a pilot, but would never want to be if I based it only on this book. Flowery Victorian language of no import throughout. The pilots can have this....

[chris_el-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“What torments me is not the humps nor hollows nor the ugliness. It is the sight, a little bit in all these men, of Mozart murdered.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

Saint-Exupéry tells the story of his love of flying, training to be a pilot in post WWI France and then flying the mail from France to Africa and then in South America. In the early days of flying crashing and other mishaps were not uncommon. And Saint-Exupéry relates several of his personal experiences trapped in the desert or on top of a plateau. He also relates how a friend and fellow aviator wrecked in the snowy mountains and everyone assumed he died until against all expectations he walked back to civilization despite the cold and terrible weather. Motivated by love of his wife, who would be left alone, he kept getting back up when he fell down, and refused to give in and die. He talks about how he and his friends purchased a slaves' freedom and flew him back home with a purse of money they collected for him to start his life anew, and how he reacted to getting his freedom back.

But, what really makes this a special book is not merely the author's experiences, interesting as they may be. But, his philosophy and expression of his heart on life and the joys of flight. Saint-Exupéry is a deeply thoughtful person and in his writing shares those thoughts about friendship, beauty, and what makes living beautiful. A thoughtful book worth pondering.

[jodihenley · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautiful, lucid, and quietly brilliant book that smells of vast open spaces and the deep night sky.

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one of a number of books I picked up years ago at a Readings warehouse sale in the first few weeks I moved to Melbourne, back in the days when I happily accumulated books much faster than I could read them. I stopped and did a tally at the end of 2012 and realised I had more than enough books to last me until the end of 2013, when I theoretically might not be in Melbourne anymore, so I stopped buying them and am now racing against the clock to see if I can finish my stockpile before I get transferred to London. I’d love to own a nice old house one day and start building an endless library, but unfortunately I’m still in my early 20s and need to keep my possessions to a minimum because I’m still at a stage in my life when I’m travelling and wandering about. First world problems.Anyway. Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a French writer and aviator of the 1920s and 1930s mostly famous in the English-speaking world for his children’s book The Little Prince, which I haven’t read. Wind, Sand and Stars is a memoir of his time as a mail pilot in the 1920s and 1930s, flying from France to the colonies in West Africa and South America.I was hoping this book would be like Roald Dahl’s awesome 1930s adventure memoir Going Solo, but it’s apples and oranges. Exupery’s writing style is lyrical (sometimes verging on purple prose), and he’s something of a philosopher, deeply wrapped up in the questions of what it means to be alive, what it is to be human, etc. There are a number of dull interludes, especially in the first half of the book, where he’s waffling on through deep layers of metaphor, trying to establish exactly how it feels to be caught up in a certain situation. I didn’t find it particularly readable.The book is much more compelling in the second half, particularly in the chapter ‘Prisoner of the Sand,’ which details his crash in the Sahara Desert during an air race from Paris to Saigon. Exupery and his co-pilot were stranded in the desert for four days and were close to death when they were miraculously rescued by a Bedouin. This fifty-page segment is brilliantly told, charting the decay of Exupery’s optimism, the agony of dehydration, and the slow unravelling of his mind – particularly, the misery of continually hallucinating rescue only to have his hopes dashed. This segment is followed up by his experience in the Spanish Civil War – as a journalist, I think – which is the only thing I’ve read about that war apart from Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and like the desert crash it was much more interesting than the first half of the book.Overall, this wasn’t a bad memoir at all if you’re prepared to put up with some heavy Latin lyricism and the occasional boring philosophical aside.

[satyridae · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my desert island books. Transcendent. Amazing. Delightful in every possible particular. Highly recommended.

[callmecayce · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I absolutely adore The Little Prince and when I saw that Saint-Exupery was also a travel writer (though his books are also autobiographies), I jumped at the chance to read one of them. I picked Wind, Sand and Stars because it contains a few passages set in the desert, which served as inspiration for The Little Prince. I really enjoyed reading Saint-Exupery's writings, for the most part. I liked his storytelling abilities, how he made both the places he visited and the people he knew come alive. I wanted to give this book five stars, but I found the last section, which was about war and Saint-Exupery's experiences on the front lines in Spain, to be a let down at the end of the novel. I was disappointed, because up until that point everything had been quite good. Of course, since it was war, the passages were darker, but that wasn't the problem. They just weren't as interesting. I'm not sure if it's because I don't like war stories, as it were, as much or what. But that was enough to knock the book down to four stars. My favorites parts were when he talked about what it felt like to fly and the sections set in the desert. My personal favorite was the last part, in the desert, when he was trying to fly across Africa and crashed along with another man. They were stranded for several days and only just survived when a man (Saint-Exupery called him an Arab, though I do not know which nationality the man was) rescued them. The way Saint-Exupery writes about his slow descent into madness (due to lack of water) along with the efforts of Saint-Exupery and the other man (his name and position escape me, though I want to say he was a co-pilot/mechanic) to fix their plane and then try to survive were quite vivid. In spite of ending on such a downer, with the war, I really liked this book and I may have to look for his others.

[steve55_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. You may perhaps be familiar with Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s work through the book The Little Prince which has become a classic for children and adults alike. This book reveals some of the inspiration Saint Exupéry drew upon.Antoine de Saint Exupéry was a pioneering French pilot opening up the routes between France and Africa at a time when such journeys taxed the capabilities of aircraft and pilots to their limits. In this book he blends a collection of wonderful tales of the period with insights from his life, writing with the hand of a poet from the heart of a philosopher.The book, written some seventy years ago, is clearly placed in its time whilst also being timeless, blending images of times past with lessons and insights that are immensely relevant to today. It spans his early adventures pioneering the mail service to Africa and onto the opening up of South America, through to his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, each with their life threatening dangers.The experiences are wonderfully described but it is his reaction to them, the response of his heart and soul that give the book the power to move the reader’s soul.In a book that has much description of life and survival in the desert, my favourite chapter is titled ‘Oasis’. Saint Exupéry leads the reader not into the oasis amidst the sand, but the oases that fill all of our lives, beautifully describing the experience of being taken into a family home in Paraguay.I often promise to return to re-read books, but this book and this chapter in particular has been read several times over.One of my favourite quotations of his is ‘.“Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young”Sadly Antoine de Saint Exupéry was killed whilst flying in 1944 at the age of 44.I commend this book to you so you may see the poet he was and find the poet you are.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"I had thought myself lost, had touched the very bottom of despair; and then, when the spirit of renunciation had filled me, I had known peace."(p 170)Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a man of action who seemed to have half a dozen different careers at once: he was a prize-winning novelist and professional mail pilot, an airborne adventurer and a war correspondent, a commercial test pilot and the author of a popular children's book. But whatever else he was doing, he never stopped writing. In this memoir he describes his experiences as a pilot in terms so poetic as to take your breath away. Few pilots perhaps have seen a cloud and thought of it as "a scarf of filings scraped off the surface of the earth and borne out to sea by the wind." The opening chapters form a sort of philosophical meditation on the nature of the life as a pilot as can be gleaned from the chapter titles: "The Craft", "The Men", "The Tool". There are moments and vignettes described as only someone who lived the life and imagined the experience could achieve. Published on the eve of World War II, the book sold out quickly on both sides of the ocean, although the form baffled readers in each language. Three months after publication, the Academie Francaise awarded it the Grand Prix du Roman, naming it the best novel of 1939. American booksellers, for their part, chose Wind, Sand and Stars as "the best non-fiction book of the year." However you classify it this book is Saint-Exupery's paean to the spirit of man, to the goals that unite us, and to the optimism that was his stock in trade. Whether you agree with him or not, the book remains one that buoys the spirit and calms the heart.

[delphica · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm not really sure how this came up, but I attended a lecture a few months ago about Antoine de Saint-Exupery and the Little Prince, and it reminded me that I had never read this French classic. I loved it. If, like me, you're the kind of person who jots down memorable quotes, you need to be careful with this because every other sentence reads like something you want to remember for the future. I think the main reason that I hadn't picked it up previously is that I'm not very interested in aviation, or deserts, but really and truly you don't need to be to enjoy this book.As this is a book largely about his experiences flying in French colonial Africa, there are a few bits that seem jarringly dated/uncomfortable, but I tried to roll with it as best I could. It is what it is.Grade: ARecommended: To just about anyone, it's a fairly quick read, and it might be especially interesting to Little Prince fans because you can pick up some threads of Saint-Exupery's thought that show up in Little Prince as well. I imagine it's spectacular if you do like the history of aviation in the first place, or adventure fiction.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Verhalen van een vliegenier in diverse continenten. Vooral interessant zijn de mijmeringen over de essentie van het menszijn (antropologische inslag). Het meest aangrijpende is zijn bijnadoodervaring in woestijn.

[michaelm42071 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Saint Exupéry writes one of the three or four greatest flying books. He became a mails pilot in 1926, flying mail and passengers for Latécoère, which became Aéropostale, flying from Toulouse into Spain and across to French West Africa and later flying in South America. He writes about the feeling of being detached from the earth and in another realm when flying. He writes about the heroic exploits of his friends Mermoz and Guillaumet, and it is the existential hero he describes: “He knew that he was responsible for himself, for the mails, for the fulfillment of the hopes of his comrades. He was holding in his hands their sorrow and their joy. He was responsible for that new element which the living were constructing and in which he was a participant. Responsible, in as much as his work contributed to it, for the fate of those men.”In “The Tool” S-E makes a couple of points about airplanes: 1) their evolving design is a matter of carving away complications to reach simplicity, and 2) they are tools to help reduce the distance between people.“The Elements” describes his flight through a “cyclone” on the slopes of the Andes. The point of “The Plane and the Planet” is that when we get up in the air, we see a far more desolate and barren landscape than we see from roads.In “The Oasis” S-E describes being taken in by a charming family when he was forced down near Concordia in the Argentine. The daughters practice on him a variant of the game he remembers his sisters playing, assessing guests and giving them a rating while they sit at table. Here the test is how he reacts to the snakes he hears hissing and slithering under the table in the dilapidated but genteel house. He does not try to show off being a pilot, “for it is extremely dangerous to clamber up to the topmost branches of a plane-tree simply to see if the nestlings are doing well or to say good morning to one’s friends.”In “Men of the Desert” he notes “I shall never be able to express clearly whence comes this pleasure men take from aridity, but always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than to any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust.”S-E says he “succumbed to the desert as soon as I saw it” in 1926, when he first began flying. A passage that must have rung true with Langewiesche when he read it:When the night is very fine and you are at the stick of your ship, you half forget yourself and bit by bit the plane begins to tilt on the left. Pretty soon, while you still imagine yourself in plumb, you see the lights of a village under your right wing. There are no villages in the desert. A fishing-fleet in mid-ocean, then? There are no fishing-fleets in mid-Sahara. What¬¬¬¬----? Of course! You smile at the way your mind has wandered and you bring the ship back to plumb again. The village slips into place. You have hooked that particular constellation back in the panoply out of which it had fallen. Village? Yes, village of stars.S-E describes the Moors who are unable to conceive of things they have not seen: waterfalls, the size of Paris, trees. He tells about Mohammed from Marrakech, a slave of the Arabs and like all slaves called Bark, whose freedom the airmen eventually buy.The penultimate section is a long self-contained narrative, “Prisoner of the Sand,” about an end-of-December 1935 Paris-Saigon flight S-E attempts with his mechanic, Prévot, in a Caudron Simoun, one of the fastest planes of the time. They lost landmarks in cumulus and adverse winds in Libya. They crash at full speed onto a gentle slope covered with “round black pebbles which had rolled over and over like ball-bearings beneath us.” Their water tank is pierced and they survive for days on a couple of oranges and a tiny amount of water, hiking away from the plane by day and building signal fires near it by night. Eventually they are rescued by a Bedouin caravan, and next day they are in Cairo.The last section, “Barcelona and Madrid (1936), concerns S-E’s experiences in those towns during the Spanish Civil War. He ponders the question why these people kill each other over political differences that hardly seem deadly. Some of the descriptions remind me of Goya etchings and Black paintings.S-E compares his own calling to those fighting for various causes, and concludes that “What all of us want is to be set free.” He ends by asking his “comrades of the air,” “When have we felt ourselves happy men?” There is a nice section about making common cause with other men: “Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

[kendrarenee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book because I have a feeling, if I'd ever met the author, I would've gotten along well with him. His philosophy of life is right on par with mine--that truth is relative ("if an orange-tree grows well in THIS soil, THIS soil is Truth for that orange-tree"); war is heinous, ugly and incomprehensible ("as for me, I only wish I understood mankind"); and the spiritual stuff in human nature must be nurtured ("but there is no gardener for men"). I also enjoyed his unique perspective on death ("death in its own time is sweet") and technology (new technology may feel unnatural to us, but it's only because our culture hasn't caught up with it yet, i.e. the locomotive). His prose also reads like poetry--beautiful writing that makes him quite the absorbing story-teller. Definitely recommend.

[davidakelly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book. Great descriptions of flying and thoughts about it

[j5v5d5a5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

His greatest book - deserves much more attention than "The Little Prince". Beautifully written and at times very poignant.

[breic2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Overly sentimental story about flying. Includes some interesting passages about flying, and one adventure story about surviving a crash landing in the desert east of the Nile. It is suffocated by suffusing sentimentality. One questions all his descriptions of other people since he liberally mixes what he knows with his often over-the-top speculations.

[hellbent_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good survival guide and backdrop for le Petit Prince.

[gibbon_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Conveys unforgettably the isolation and danger of flying in the 1920s and '30s with rudimentary instruments and landing fields and only elementary knowledge of the atmosphere and weather. The book about flying by which all others are judged.