Gorgeous writing that transcends time and space.

Well, this is three books actually. Some of it is three star worthy, some of it four or five stars...

Exceptional

Was a disappointment after Little Prince. He writes well, but seems to wander to the minor points and drop engrossing story lines without finishing them while focusing on minor bits. Good prose, meh storytelling.

This edition contains three St. Exupery books: Flight to Arras; Wind, Sand and Stars; and Night Flight. All three are memoirs of some of St. Exupery's adventures as a pilot assigned to postal mailing routes during the early days of flight.

Wind, Sand and Stars is the most philosophical memoir in the collection whereas Night Flight and Flight to Arras are more exciting. St. Exupery certainly led an action-packed life, but what's more amazing is his ability to remain thoughtful and creative even while stranded in the desert or captured by bedouins. His writing may be fun for those who crave adventure but it's also a real treat for any student of human nature to read St. Exupery's profound self-examinations and thoughts about life.

I was let down; I found my copy in an old used bookstore in Kalisbell, MT. As a HUGE The Little Prince fan, I was waiting for Saint-Exupery to live up to my expectations and I just didn't like it. If anything, this book was written for the "grownups".

This comprises Wind, Sand, and Stars; Night Flight; and Flight to Arras. Of the three I found Night Flight the weakest. Saint-Exupery's personal philosophy is quixotic and compelling when he's writing about himself, but doesn't have the same level of animation when applied to fictional characters (even if those characters are, perhaps, thinly veiled self-inserts). Wind, Sand, and Stars is rambling but full of moments of the sublime; Flight to Arras is riveting and angry and trying, somehow, to find hope in defeat, and if I think it doesn't quite succeed that doesn't mean I don't respect the effort.

These books, and other writings of de Saint-Exupery, have informed my life. I read them first for university French Lit class, and they still have pride of place on my bookshelf 52 years later. Mandatory reading and re-reading for the development (and maintenance) of one's humanity, one's humility, and one's capacity for awe.

Or, to be more precise:
-Wind, Sand, and Stars: 4.5 stars. Pretty amazing, especially if you're a 12- to 16-year old boy, or still have the adventure sensibilities of one.
-Night Flight: 3 stars. Positively eh.
-Flight to Arras: first two-thirds, 4 stars; second third, two stars. A strong beginning and middle, bogged down by an icky torrent of schmaltz at the end...

Found this in a free little library so didn’t have much reason for reading it besides that it was there and that I thought it would be interesting to know more about the author.

The stories evoke the Jules Verne novels which I read in high school so I enjoyed them for that vibe. Saint Ex has lots of insights about human nature etc. which is always interesting to me. I don’t really care if someone is right or qualified to say things. I just like it when someone sits down and says here are some thoughts I’ve had along with stories from my life which made me think these thoughts. That genre of book is just always very compelling to me. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would be another of this genre that I recently read.

I first read "Wind, Sand and Stars" many years ago and was enchanted, and am looking forward to reading it again in this collection of Saint-Exupery's three glorious books about flying. But I feel impelled to comment, not very graciously, on the introduction by Richard Bach. It's atrocious!!! Badly written, sometimes impenetrable as to sentence structure, and contains many labored or cliched images and language. What a shame to have Saint-Exupery's crystalline prose preceded by such a painful contrast!! To be honest, when I was reading the first several paragraphs, I thought maybe it had been badly translated from French, that's how bad it was.

Three novellas written on the early 1940s by the author of The Little Prince. As a pilot flying the early exotic routes of Africa and South America without modern navigational aides, he combines vivid descriptions of places and times with reflection about the human spirit.

I was led to this classic when browsing Patagonia on the web. And thanks to the Alberta library system, I was able to borrow and enjoy it.