Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN: 9780156012195
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0156012197
Label: Harvest Books
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: 2000-05-15
Publisher: Harvest Books
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Studio: Harvest Books

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

Customer Rating:
Summary: The Little Prince
Comment: I ordered four copies, one came with alot of print written in it and highlighting. Was supposed to be in excellent state and I couldn't track who sent it.

Wonderful story, but the poor state of the book detracted from me giving it as a gift...I rate the story as a 5+ but the book you sent a 1. So give it a 3 overall.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Man, I love this book ...
Comment: And I love how I ordered it on a Friday and it arrived the following Monday! I feel very satisfied with the price and promptness of my order. I just hope my nephew is satisfied with receiving a book for his 9th birthday...

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Customer Rating:
Summary: one of my favorites
Comment: this is one of my favorite stories. I read it as a child and enjoyed it, re-read it as a teenager and understood more of the symbolism, then as an adult, of course, understood even more of the meaning. Everyone could get something from this story.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Funny and moving at the same time
Comment: The two main characters in the book have one thing in common, and that is they both don't like grown-ups (this despite one of the characters being a grown-up). In the book, the narrator's plane crashes in the middle of the desert, and he meets a little boy from another planet. In this particular universe, all the planets (including the little prince's) are inhabited by one person, except Earth (in which there are many people). The little prince's planet is so small, that the prince can go in a different time-zone just by moving his chair a little.

The little prince's planet has a rose which the prince loves a lot and takes care of by watering it. Now, the prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep, which he does, and a sheep comes to life in the prince's planet as if in a fantasy. The prince then wants to protect the rose from the sheep who would like to eat it, and the narrator draws a muzzle around the sheep's mouth, and that too becomes a reality in the prince's planet.

The best part of the book is when the little prince visits other planets like his, and meets their lone inhabitants, such as the king, the tippler, the businessman, the lamplighter and the geographer. The book starts out being a comedy but it becomes more emotional as it progresses until we reach the touching ending.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Comment: Ah, the amount of philosophy and beauty and imagination you can cram into a story this short! I have never read the original French version, but the English translation is as powerful as I could hope for, a surreal story of fantasy that speaks such eternal truths of love and life and the sheer faith of childhood.

We have a man who has put aside his childhood dreams to grow up. His plane crashes in the desert, and it is here he meets a young prince from a distant asteroid.

As we have the gritty real story of survival, we have a powerful and yet just as real story of this little boy's adventures and discovery.

It's a strong and complex parable, and also just a great story besides.

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