Wind, Sand, and Stars Book

Whenever I am forced to name my most favorite book ever, my automatic response is Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. I read it first when I was a boy but I did not understand what was it all about except the hat with an elephant inside and the planet with big trees called baobab. The second time was in college when it was a required reading in World Literature. I did not really like it until my professor explained that the novel was about man's search for friendship. I recall that there was no internet at the time and I still had to go to the school library to research more on Saint-Ex's life so I can make a better book report. We were not required to read other books (that was great since you know how busy a college student can be) of the same author and there was no Wikipedia yet. So, my knowledge of Saint-Ex stopped with his tale of this little prince.

I re-read it from cover to cover this month as it was voted by the Filipinos here in Goodreads for February 2012 group read. It was for this reason, why I read this other popular Antoine de Saint-Exupery's book, Wind, Sand and Stars. I wanted to find out more about the man and probably more about The Little Prince.

Since this was originally written in French, its title was Terre des homes that literally means "Land of Men" when it was published in France in 1939. Later that year, it was published in the US as "Land of People" But when The Little Prince became a worldwide phenomenon in 1943, the US publishers changed the title to Wind, Sand and Stars maybe to establish its connection between the two books. In the US, this book Wind, Sand and Stars won the National Book Award in 1939 for the Non-Fiction Category. The National Geographic Adventure magazine also memoir as No. 3 in its all-time list of 100 best adventure-exploration books.

For you who loved The Little Prince, read this book. You will see semblances of that book's characters and events with what happened to Saint-Ex in this book. There is a scene here where Saint-Ex, the pilot of Aerospostale (airmail carrier) landed in a place full of meteorites. There is his bestfriend Henri Guillaumet (1902-1940) who in June 13, 1930, crashed in another place and though tempted to give up, he persisted while thinking of his wife, Noëlle, (very similar to Saint-Ex thinking of his rose) until June 19 at dawn when he was rescued by a 14-year-old boy named Juan García (who should be his inspiration for his Little Prince character). Some critics say that Guillaumet is Little Prince himself or maybe the fox but Saint-Ex dedicated that book to Leon Werth, his other friend who he met in 1931. Léon Werth (1878-1955) spent the war unobtrusively in Saint-Amour, his village in the Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he "was alone, cold and hungry", and had few nice words on French refugees. Saint-Ex returned to Europe in early 1943, rationalizing, "I cannot bear to be far from those who are hungry... I am leaving in order to suffer and thereby be united with those who are dear to me."

The book is very insightful. He reminded me of Richard Bach who wrote my favorite love story, The Bridge Across Forever. Saint-Ex brilliantly connected love, life, flying and male friendship. I am sure that he inspired Bach who is also a pilot and a novelist.

The only difficulty I had with this book was my zero interest on flying. I am more of a sea or mountain person. Thus, there were parts when I could not stop hum-hum while reading. But overall, since I love The Little Prince, I appreciated to the answers this book provided me. Answers to the questions that I had when I was a little boy for the first time reading about the little prince in the desert up to the time when I re-read it in college and learned that it was about man's search for friendship.