Book Review - Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated from the French by Lewis Galantiere

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966 (this translation first published in 1939, first published in French as Terre des hommes in 1939)

I recently reviewed Night Flight which was my first foray into Saint-Exupery, and was keen to get to one of his better-known works, and here we are. Saint-Exupery was a philosopher of the air, but much more than that a searcher for what is true in man. Wind, Sand and Stars describes Saint-Exupery's experience flying in Africa and South America, but what he is searching for in his writing is the spark that makes us human. He finds flying takes him above and beyond everyday cares and lets him touch the eternal, but it is  sharing that feeling with others that makes it valid.

Saint-Exupery states that "Truth, for any man, is that which makes him a man." When one accepts that, then all enmity can be cast aside. Even during war, when men fight, enmity can be cast aside - if both men are fighting for their truth, they are both men, and to be respected.

This is a hard thing to grasp, or even to understand - Saint-Exupery searches for it throughout this book. At first his comments on "normal" people (office workers and the type) seem derogatory, until the reader understands that Saint-Exupery feels a great sadness for them, that they never had the chance to become something more than they are, through no fault of their own.

This book is really a paean to brotherhood. Saint-Exupery found it in the fraternity of pilots with whom he flew the mails, and he observed it in the trenches with the Republicans in the early part of the Spanish Civil War. He tries to pull apart what binds men together in such situations, both the French pilots and soldiers, as well as the tribesmen who in turn befriended and massacred the French. He explores what it is to be free in the story of Bark, aka Mohammed ben Lhaoussin, the slave that Saint-Exupery and his comrades freed.

As he did in Night Flight, Saint-Exupery explores what it is to be human, while describing life on the edge of death. He comes to the conclusion that if you have lived, then death is not something to be feared for oneself, but only for those one leaves behind. This was the lesson he learned after nearly dying of thirst in the desert after a 'plane crash.

While his sentiments may seem a little of their time now in the twenty-first century, Saint-Exupery is still worth reading as a seeker for the truth. I enjoyed this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell