The Pilot and the Little Prince
The Life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Peter Sís's remarkable biography The Pilot and the Little Prince celebrates the author of The Little Prince, one of the most beloved books in the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in France in 1900, when airplanes were just being invented. Antoine dreamed of flying and grew up to be a pilot—and that was when his adventures began. He found a job delivering mail by plane, which had never been done before. He and his fellow pilots traveled to faraway places and discovered new ways of getting from one place to the next. Antoine flew over mountains and deserts. He battled winds and storms. He tried to break aviation records, and sometimes he even crashed. From his plane, Antoine looked down on the earth and was inspired to write about his life and his pilot-hero friends in memoirs and in fiction.
A Frances Foster Book
This title has Common Core connections.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following biographies of Darwin and Galileo, S s celebrates legendary pilot Antoine de Saint-Exup ry (1900 1944). As in The Tree of Life, S s supplements a main narrative with time lines and insets, wrapping squint-inducing italics around dreamlike illustrations. Readers learn about Saint-Exup ry's fascination with flight and roles as a mail and military pilot. The spreads allude to M li s' Le Voyage dans la lune and map Saint-Exup ry's North African mail routes, without examining WWI or colonial history. S s crafts expansive, nostalgic palimpsests, illustrating the hero's adventures with precision ink dots on sepia ground, yet he writes with emotional distance. Readers may wonder why Saint-Exup ry's father, brother, and sister died young; why "hostile nomads" objected to his Moroccan outpost; why his wife has a Spanish name; and how he and his friends survived multiple plane crashes. S s recounts astounding feats in an offhand tone (two fliers landed their plane "on a ledge" in the Andes, then "rocked it until it went over the edge and started up"). Gorgeous, densely imagined, yet fragmented in its telling, this narrative will send readers beyond The Little Prince to hear more of this mind-boggling story. Ages 5 9.
