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Amazon.com ReviewAntoine 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.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 Another review :This little book is certainly one of the best-known and most popular in French literature. Though at heart a children’s story, it is rightly considered a classic in its own sense and is even found within respected French literary anthologies. Its author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, is also famous for other works of fiction (“Vol de Nuit” etc.). Like the narrator in “The Little Prince,” St-Exupery was a pilot as well. He apparently crashed or was shot down flying as a WWII pilot towards the end of the war and was never found. His likeness, along with that of the little prince and his pet lamb and the famous drawing of the elephant in the boa-constrictor, are all on the French 50 Franc note.The story can basically be split into two parts: The first part is the short introduction dealing with the narrator and his view of the world when he was a child and how adults could never understand the real meaning of things or perceive truth in the world–only the superficial and the usual. This is generally one of the main ideas of the book; “blessed are the children…”. The rest of the book is the story of the little prince, whom the narrator discovers in the Sahara when he is trying to fix his downed airplane and is in fear of his life. The narrator and the reader slowly come to know the prince’s story and learn about friendship, love and truth in a touching way. My favorite parts are those dealing with the prince’s relationship with his beloved rose left on his planet and the prince’s relationship with the wise little fox, who offers the prince his philosophical secret on life. — Some random dudeI’m sure this will make a change from getting spiritual and philosophical views pounded into your head over and over. It’s a simple book that reminds you of the things that are really important in life, and that life is meant to be experienced and lived, with heart and passion above all else. –CenturionGoodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”