Despite the heavy-handed religious reading of the book and some proselytizing, many will enjoy learning about Saint-Exupéry...
The story behind one of the world’s most popular books.
Early on in this intriguing quest to solve the “enigma” of The Little Prince, “a true publishing phenomenon,” child psychologist Lassus notes that the book is fourth on the list of the world’s “most-read” books, after the Bible, the Quran, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. The favorite book of both Martin Heidegger and James Dean was written in America during World War II at the request of the exiled author’s American publisher. Antoine Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) was experiencing “deep moral anguish” at the time as well as writing a spiritual autobiography, The Wisdom of the Sands, which was posthumously published. Beautifully illustrated with watercolors by the author, this fairy tale for children, as some describe it, is about a little lost boy/prince from another planet who lands in a desert where a pilot is trying to repair his plane. They both want to go home. Saint-Exupéry was an accomplished pilot who wrote a number of hugely popular and award-winning autobiographical books about aviation. He was brought up Catholic in a family dominated by women but never seriously practiced his religion as an adult. Lassus notes that there are no women in The Little Prince and that the author also once crashed a plane in the desert. Lassus goes on to interpret the book as a “metaphor of the author’s life,” identifying real-life parallels for key elements in the book. He focuses on what he sees as the book’s spiritual message, exploring such topics as the annunciation, ascension, and Eden; quotations from the Bible become prevalent. For Lassus, the book seems “more of a parable than a fairy tale.”
Despite the heavy-handed religious reading of the book and some proselytizing, many will enjoy learning about Saint-Exupéry and his life and how he came to write such a beloved book.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-681-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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