The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard HowardBrand: Mariner Books
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-15
ISBN: 0156012197
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Mariner Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780156012195
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Little Prince
Book Review: Take time to stop and smell the roses
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a children's book?
Perhaps. Maybe, as Saint Exupery implies, adults are too sophisticated, too wise, too adult, to understand the eloquent common sense about living a rational life. It takes some thought, insight and reason to comprehend the innate meaning. It's the ultimate 'take time to stop and smell the roses" book, which brings to mind an anecdote from 'Art and Fear' by David Batles and Ted Orland, quoting Howard Ikemoto:
"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college -- that my job was to teach people how to draw.
"She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"
The Little Prince is just as incredulous about many attitudes he encounters on Earth; on his travels, he keeps meeting adults who are wrapped up in their self-importance and egos. Surely, Saint Exupery understood the difference; his dedication was to "Leon Werth" in 1943 France, which he "corrected" to read, "To Leon Werth when he was a little boy."
It's a book of wonderful important things which children understand (it made me appreciate once again the importance of rotten crab apples) but which we set aside as adults. Children will understand it instinctively in their hearts . . . . . think of reading a few pages every night as a child falls asleep. Adults will love the allegories, and it will truly bring back memories of their own rag doll, or blankie (to use a term from Peanuts), or worn baseball glove, or even their own squishy soft rotten apples.
As adults, we are all familiar with advertising; but, how manjy of us realize that advertising is lies -- not in an absolute literal sense -- but because it emphasizes terrible destructive myths and untruths to us (Do things really go better with Coke?)
Written in 1943, when Adolf Hitler dominated much of Europe, the Little Prince meets an "absolute monarch" who tells him, "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution." In other words, absolute authority depends on being reasonable; unreasonable orders reflect a failure of the person giving the order, not a fault of anyone unable to carry out such an order.
"When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a litte from the truth," Saint Exupery writes. Balance that with an observation by Pablo Picasso, "Computers are useless -- all they can give you are answers."
In a world jammed with billions of facts and little or no understanding, this book is a reminder that a full and complete life is more than "the bottom line" of anything. Had I read it as a little boy, I don't think I'd have understood its wisdom; had I read it as an young adult, I don't think I'd have understood its wisdom; having at last read it, I hope I'm not to late to understand its wisdom.
Summary of The Little Prince
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. Richard Howard's new translation of the beloved classic-published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's birth-beautifully reflects Saint-Exupéry's unique and gifted style. Howard, an acclaimed poet and one of the preeminent translators of our time, has excelled in bringing the English text as close as possible to the French, in language, style, and most important, spirit. The artwork in this new edition has been restored to match in detail and in color Saint-Exupéry's original artwork. By combining the new translation with restored original art, Harcourt is proud to introduce the definitive English-language edition of
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
The Little Prince describes his journey from planet to planet, each tiny world populated by a single adult. It's a wonderfully inventive sequence, which evokes not only the great fairy tales but also such monuments of postmodern whimsy as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And despite his tone of gentle bemusement, Saint-Exupéry pulls off some fine satiric touches, too. There's the king, for example, who commands the Little Prince to function as a one-man (or one-boy) judiciary:
I have good reason to believe that there is an old rat living somewhere on my planet. I hear him at night. You could judge that old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. That way his life will depend on your justice. But you'll pardon him each time for economy's sake. There's only one rat.The author pokes similar fun at a businessman, a geographer, and a lamplighter, all of whom signify some futile aspect of adult existence. Yet his tale is ultimately a tender one--a heartfelt exposition of sadness and solitude, which never turns into Peter Pan-style treacle. Such delicacy of tone can present real headaches for a translator, and in her 1943 translation, Katherine Woods sometimes wandered off the mark, giving the text a slightly wooden or didactic accent. Happily, Richard Howard (who did a fine nip-and-tuck job on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma in 1999) has streamlined and simplified to wonderful effect. The result is a new and improved version of an indestructible classic, which also restores the original artwork to full color. "Trying to be witty," we're told at one point, "leads to lying, more or less." But Saint-Exupéry's drawings offer a handy rebuttal: they're fresh, funny, and like the book itself, rigorously truthful. --James Marcus
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