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Wind, Sand and Stars
By Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Wind, Sand and Stars

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, best known to posterity as the author of The Little Prince, served eight years as a pilot in the French mail service, winging his way to distant and dangerous lands in the 1920s and '30s--days when climbing into the cockpit of an airplane was no casual act. Out of those flights came the book Wind, Sand and Stars, offering the author's ruminations on life as a pilot and all that he saw from his lofty perch--not just the physical landscape, but metaphysical views about the world, nature, and man's place therein.

At its best, Wind, Sand and Stars offers de Saint-Exupéry's philosophical insights wrapped in poetic imagery that sweeps the reader away from his living room and back, through space and time, to the lonely wilds of Patagonia and the Sahara. Every so often the author writes prose so rich and satisfying to read that the book seems as elevated as the wings of the former pilot's plane. Yet, the text also suffers at the hands of the very same philosophizing; at times, de Saint-Exupéry's words trail through tangents that seem, if not pointless, then at least lacking in the same level of insight as other parts of the work.

Thus, the text veers up and down in accordance with the whims of the writer's thoughts. An emergency landing due to some mechanical failure--apparently an all-too-common occurrence in those days--produced the author's account of a visit with a family in Argentina, a delightful, charming, whimsical scene. Tales of days and nights spent in the desolation of the Sahara evoke exactly the sense of adventure and wonder one would expect from such adventures. And de Saint-Exupéry's account of a crash landing in the Libyan desert, an occasion when he and his engineer nearly died of thirst and exposure, brings to vivid life the experience of desperation and despair, as well as the joy of salvation felt upon their miraculous rescue by a Bedouin herdsman. These episodes are thoroughly enjoyable reads in their own right, even if they make together a disjointed narrative.

Then again, other passages go completely off course. Some of de Saint-Exupery's ruminations on life and being, while hardly worthy of contempt, come across as unsatisfying, and perhaps a little too far out of context, And the book's close--the author's lengthy account of his time spent in Spain during that nation's civil war, including his meandering contemplation of every man around him and his greater meaning--takes all the steam out of the narrative. The last thirty pages of the book are, to be frank, just plain boring--even though those pages are focused on the life and death struggle of a civil war!

Wind, Sand and Stars is uneven, to say the least. As a time capsule, revealing to its readers visions of a word long since past, and certainly never to be seen again, the book has some value. But too much of this work, when trying to soar to lofty heights, simply crashes and burns. How much pleasure you will get from these pages depends largely upon your interest in that other time, in aviation, in meditations upon the life of man--and your indulgence.