The Wisdom of the Sands

by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Book Overview

"Citadellet" er en vidunderlig samling af den franske forfatter Antoine de Saint-Exup?rys tanker om civilisation, kultur, religion og et v ld af andre ting, der g r os til mennesker. Forfatterens... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B00534OXSI
• Release Date: January 1950
• Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Should not be missed!

Excellent book. You don't have to agree with all what is said there, but it can make you think differently. One of the books where if you do not read between the lines, you are loosing a lot of the content. The story is secondary. And definitely, this is not the book you would read or even want to read in one day. Overall, it's an extraordinary accomplishment. Together with Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one of the best books out there.

Great deal, great book, it arrived a bit late

Thank you for the book. I only wished I knew it would be shipped from France! Not knowing that I began to worry when I realized it took so long to get to me, supposedly from within US. It was a gift for someone special, but it all worked out, eventually. Cristian

Saint-Exupery's greatest book

"The Wisdom of the Sands" is a collection of Saint-Exupery's very personal reflections published posthumously as a series of parables. The rhythm of his lonely, compassionate, and mystical voice in this work enraptured me. The work concludes with the most profound and moving essay on friendship that I have ever read, one that far transcends his well-known fable "The Little Prince." His reflections on loneliness will resonate with anyone who has struggled with not succumbing to despair, and who has instead found God and love and compassion at the far end of this struggle. Saint-Exupery weaves his great love for the vast, lonely, and empty Saharan desert of his youth that he crossed many times in the 1920s pioneering airmail routes for Air France with personal reflections and understandings of the Biblical mysteries that transpired in this same corner of the earth thousands of years ago. He returned to the African desert in the last days of his life, where he was based as a P-38 reconnaisance pilot in a world that had turned ugly and that ultimately, I believe, broke his heart, based on the sad voice that resonates from these pages, one trying to make peace with the earth and with life before he dies.This collection, along with Dag Hammarskjold's "Markings," are my two favorite books, and both are very similar in nature though distinguished by their authors' personal voices and souls and writing style. Both document the spiritual journeys of two lonely European men in this century in a very personal way. Saint-Exupery's soulful reflections on the nature of love, friendship, loneliness, community, and duty are words I turn to again and again and that have grown with me through the years and acquired new meaning as I have matured.