Product Description

This parable tells the story of an air pilot who meets a Little Prince when he has to make a forced landing in the Sahara Desert. The Little Prince tells him wise and enchanted stories.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3617 in Books
• Published on: 1991-01-10
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
You could be excused for thinking that this book is one containing a simple story for young children about a Little Prince. How wrong you would be! This is far from the truth: it is much more. It is a complex story containing lots of ambiguities about a child with golden hair. These are all eruditely discussed before the actual story begins, in a section entitled "How It All Began". "Is The Little Prince a story written for children or is it a meditation intended for adults?"

The Art of Living is discussed, along with a system of values, and the train of thought behind them is the unifying element. You are invited to "look at the book, and allow yourself to travel from one image to the next... " It was written and published more than 50 years ago in the USA, and the author was a Frenchman who illustrated the book himself; it was later translated by Kathryn Woods. The Little Prince is still very popular and has now been translated into many languages. Shortly after it was first written, the author died--disappearing together with his plane somewhere over the Mediterranean. This Gift edition contains all the original illustrations, plus some more original drawings that came to light later and have been published here for the first time.--Susan Naylor

Customer Reviews

An unforgettable, heart-warming story
Possibly the most beautiful book of the twentieth century, the Little Prince will appeal to the hearts of adults and children alike. It tells the story of a little prince, who falls to earth from a star, and of the airman, stranded in the desert by the crash of his place, who seeks to understand the prince's secret. The premise is simple and the story simply told, and yet Saint-Exupery creates a tale that is full of poignancy and hope.

As the little prince journeys the planets around his own home, Asteroid B612, he encounters a variety of individuals: the Conceited Man, the King, the Accountant, the Drunkard, the Geographer and the Lamplighter. Each one becomes a parable of human nature: or rather, the nature of adults. The Little Prince is a story about childhood, mortality (made all the more poignant by the fact that Saint-Exupery died in action in WW2, the year after the book's publication), friendship, love, hope and the magic in our lives that we are at risk of losing as we grow older. For me it held enormous personal emotional value.

If you can manage to read it in the original French then by all means do, but any translation still conveys some of the treasure in Saint-Exupery's words. Personally I recommend the Wordsworth Children's Classics edition for its translation, if not the poorly reproduced illustrations, but I think I may just have a personal bias for the first edition I read.

For a so-called 'children's book,' this is one that will live with you for the rest of your life.

Little Classic
I first read this almost thirty years ago as part of my French A Level course. I have read it every couple of years ever since. It has always been one of my favourite all time books. Is it a childrens' or a grown up's book. Who cares? It speaks to everyone.

It is the simple tale of a pilot who is grounded in the desert and meets the enigmatic Prince who has come from another planet. A tiny planet inhabited by the Prince and his beloved flower - and the constant fear of Baobab trees which could overwhelm everything. It is so small that he once watched 44 sunsets. He watches these when he is sad. How sad he must have been on that day observes the narrator. It is a beautiful story about friendship. We laugh as much as we cry. The author's drawing of the empty landscape after his friend's departure still chokes me.

But there is also the humour. Normally at the expense of our bizarre adult world. The Prince meets a merchant who sells a pill that means there is no need to drink. This could save several minutes each day. The Little Prince observes that if he had that time he would go to a fountain and have a nice cool drink.

St. Exupery is much loved in France. He was even on the money before the Euro arrived. This is much deserved for this little classic alone. Read it in English or French or whatever you like. But read it - now.

Wonderful book in an altogether inadequate translation
Richard Howard's cold, hard translation of Le Petit Prince loses all the grace and charm of the original work. Seek out Katherine Woods's original translation of this book--although she was criticized for translating the story too literally, Howard's "streamlined" version loses absolutely EVERYTHING. I've only studied French for a few years, but I've already found one word that he has mistranslated. Concerning the picture of the baobabs, Saint-Exupery uses the word "grandiose." While Woods used "magnificent and impressive," Howard replaced this with "big." Despicable. I realize he probably misread the word, but I was already unhappy with this new version as I was reading through it. The rest of his translation proved to be completely pointless. He does not come close to matching Woods.
I'm also offended that the publishers would try to replace Woods's classic translation with one that has language they consider to be more modern. Le Petit Prince was written in the 1940s with what would assumedly be French of the 1940s. Thus, wouldn't it make sense to keep it in English of the 1940s?
Please do your best to obtain a copy of a version of The Little Prince from well before 2000. Howard has no love for our little prince. His rendition of the book holds no compassion.