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Summary
Summary
Peter Sís's remarkable biography The Pilot and the Little Prince celebrates the author of The Little Prince , one of the most beloved books in the world.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in France in 1900, when airplanes were just being invented. Antoine dreamed of flying and grew up to be a pilot--and that was when his adventures began. He found a job delivering mail by plane, which had never been done before. He and his fellow pilots traveled to faraway places and discovered new ways of getting from one place to the next. Antoine flew over mountains and deserts. He battled winds and storms. He tried to break aviation records, and sometimes he even crashed. From his plane, Antoine looked down on the earth and was inspired to write about his life and his pilot-hero friends in memoirs and in fiction.
A Frances Foster Book
This title has Common Core connections.
Author Notes
Peter Sís is the internationally renowned author and/or illustrator of many books for children. He received Caldecott Honors for Starry Messenger , Tibet Through the Red Box , and Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain . He is the recipient of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration and the 2015 Society of Illustrators Lifetime Achievement Award, and has also been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He has lived in and around New York City since 1984.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following biographies of Darwin and Galileo, Sis celebrates legendary pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944). As in The Tree of Life, Sis supplements a main narrative with time lines and insets, wrapping squint-inducing italics around dreamlike illustrations. Readers learn about Saint-Exupery's fascination with flight and roles as a mail and military pilot. The spreads allude to Melies' Le Voyage dans la lune and map Saint-Exupery's North African mail routes, without examining WWI or colonial history. Sis crafts expansive, nostalgic palimpsests, illustrating the hero's adventures with precision ink dots on sepia ground, yet he writes with emotional distance. Readers may wonder why Saint-Exupery's father, brother, and sister died young; why "hostile nomads" objected to his Moroccan outpost; why his wife has a Spanish name; and how he and his friends survived multiple plane crashes. Sis recounts astounding feats in an offhand tone (two fliers landed their plane "on a ledge" in the Andes, then "rocked it until it went over the edge and started up"). Gorgeous, densely imagined, yet fragmented in its telling, this narrative will send readers beyond The Little Prince to hear more of this mind-boggling story. Ages 5-9. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
On glorious blue endpapers, an airplane loops across a map of the world, its contrail made of words that seem to dissolve on the page. The pointillist style of the map's outline suggests both stargazing and looking through a microscope. So Ss foreshadows the scope of this picture book biography, simultaneously grand and intimate, and its tone: subtle, playful, and mysterious. The narrative includes a history of airplanes and pilots, the beginnings of air mail, two world wars, scenes on four continents, and an extraordinary number of plane crashes, all augmenting the central story of Antoine, the golden-haired boy who never stopped exploring and adventuring, in the air and on the page. The main text, a fairly clear line through Saint-Exupery's life, is supplemented with myriad facts about his world, arranged in delicate circles around the edges of Ss's signature illustrated medallions. Here you can find information on Saint-Exupery's family tree or the perfume inspired by his book Night Flight or pithy anecdotes about his writing life. Visually stunning, this impressive accumulation of words, pictures, and design takes you to The Little Prince (rev. 5/43), or back to it, with fresh understanding and admiration. sarah ellis (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sis' works are less picture books than little miracles of design, a craft he now devotes to a biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince. That de Saint-Exupery's life was interesting in its own right growing up fatherless, pioneering ever-more dangerous airmail delivery routes, flying in WWII is nearly beside the point, because Sis has created such a compelling, multilayered visual treat. The writing itself occupies three levels: one at the bottom of the page tells the exciting but bare-bones story, ideal for younger children looking for a general overview; a second level directly above offers small, colorful details captioned with succinct facts; and the third offers more complex factual information integrated into the images. And what images they are! Multifaceted and evocative, they capture the mile-a-second swirl of a little boy's imagination, the awesome grandeur of flight, and the danger of battle. Sis (The Wall, 2007) never misses an opportunity to hit readers with the power of pure image, as in a two-page spread of a plane flying over a geography of faces, sure to live on in many a child's imagination. Sis' masterful and moving sense of design never fails.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PERHAPS THE LAST of the great rugged individualists were the early pilots. Their dangerous solo missions made heroes of them all as they paved the way for modern aviation. None was more beloved than "Lucky Lindy" himself, Charles A. Lindbergh, who completed the first lone nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 21, 1927. In a way reminiscent of Robert Lawson's 1939 children's book "Ben and Me," which suggested that Benjamin Franklin's brilliant ideas came from a Philadelphia mouse named Amos, the young German artist Torben Kuhlmann has reimagined the Lindbergh legend through the character of an inventive rodent. "Lindbergh: The Tale of a Flying Mouse" unfolds like the detailed storyboard for a major motion picture, painted appropriately in sepia, the color of faded photographs. A well-read mouse, whose friends are rapidly disappearing from Hamburg, decides he must leave for America. Stowing away on a freighter is out of the question, for hungry cats prowl the wharf. Studying bats as they flit about the city and Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of flying contraptions, he constructs a pair of mechanical wings, but crashes on the test run. He decides he must learn how to fly an airplane. No one has done it before, but that does not discourage this clever creature from building his own miniature steam-powered version. Soaring far above the cats and owls lying in wait for him, he passes over city, country and ocean, realizing he has finally reached his destination when he spots the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. This first one-mouse trans-Atlantic flight creates an international frenzy and, Kuhlmann suggests, may have inspired the young Charles Lindbergh to duplicate its course many years later. F. Robert van der Linden of the Smithsonian Institution provides a wry foreword to reassure any readers who doubt the veracity of the narrative. Kuhlmann created "Lindbergh" while attending university and demonstrates what a masterly illustrator he already is. The eye soars between aerial views and close-ups of old Hamburg in this beautifully rendered and well-thought-out picture book. Kuhlmann's highly detailed, rather somber panoramas intensify the drama, while his animals are as accurate and endearing as Beatrix Potter's. "Lindbergh" is a splendid debut. In "The Pilot and the Little Prince," Peter Sis explores the short, eventful life of another early aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, now best remembered as the author of the children's book "The Little Prince," which last spring celebrated the 70 th anniversary of its publication in the United States. Sis is the master of the picture book biography. Whether recounting the life of Columbus, Galileo, Darwin or Saint-Exupéry, Sis sees a pattern: A little boy follows his dream into adulthood and changes the world. All of them serve as metaphors for the artist's own flight from Communist Czechoslovakia that he most eloquently depicted in his autobiographical Caldecott Honor book, "The Wall." Sis suggests in his new title that the Pilot of "The Little Prince" is Saint-Exupéry and the Little Prince his child self. Like Kuhlmann, Sis employs a muted, nearly monochromatic palette, here in alternating spreads of sky blue and earthy browns, to describe the little-known exploits of the celebrated French writer and hero. The celestial serenity is shattered by violent blood-red watercolor washes as the Germans invade France in 1940. This unnerving battle scene is followed immediately by the wordless spread of a silvery full moon reflected on the vast expanse of the deep blue sea as Saint-Exupéry heads, in exile, for New York City. The writing of "The Little Prince" comes almost as an afterthought while the French pilot waits out the war on Long Island - that is, until one realizes that, in Sis's rendering, the author's entire life led up to its creation. The narrative evokes the gentle romantic philosophy of Saint-Exupéry's children's book; and Sis, a far more gifted artist than the divinely amateurish Frenchman, invokes the original Little Prince himself in another silent spread of the writer-pilot looking to the stars for inspiration. On July 31, 1944, the plane he was flying was lost at sea and never recovered. Instead of clumsy speculation on his hero's demise, Sis offers a sweetly elegiac conclusion: "Maybe Antoine found his own glittering planet next to the stars." As in his earlier picture-book biographies, Sis supplements the main story line with all sorts of fun facts, here quite likely plucked from Stacy Schiff's full-length life of Saint-Exupéry, a 1995 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Sis adds details about his subject's life (such as the many plane crashes the pilot survived) in teeny tiny type around lozenge-size tondos that dot the pages like visual footnotes. He also supplies a succinct history of early aviation along with sly pictorial references to Georges Méliès's 1902 film "A Trip to the Moon," and even to his own well-known "Subway Whale" poster. The pictures employ a riot of mixed media: translucent watercolor, pointillist pen-and-ink, rubber stamps and scratched color on gesso. Sis often relies on his distinctive graphic shorthand: For example, deaths are indicated by ghostly white silhouettes of the deceased, literary works by open books that flutter across the page like butterflies. Historians may quibble about certain Sisian assertions ("Airplanes had just been invented and France was the center of aviation"). Yet none will challenge the beauty of the luminous artwork. Neither "Lindbergh" nor "The Pilot and the Little Prince" is a conventional picture book; these are really stunningly visual storybooks, better suited to older readers and their parents than to preschoolers. Charles Lindbergh is but a vague memory to most people. Today, "The Little Prince" probably resonates with sensitive adolescents rather than little children. And Kuhlmann and Sis do not dwell in Margaret Wise Brown country: Their content and sentence structure are often complex ("He didn't speak English and felt out of place, no longer flying but endlessly contemplating the direction the world was taking"). What 5-year-old really needs to know that Saint-Exupéry dedicated "Letter to a Hostage" to the French writer Léon Werth? Yet anyone of any age will be beguiled by these two extraordinary flights of fancy. MICHAEL PATRICK HEARN is at work on "The Annotated Edgar Allan Poe."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4 Up-As in his works about other restless souls who charted their courses by the stars and pondered big questions (Columbus, Galileo, Darwin), Sis's picture-book biography of the famous French aviator and author comprises multiple layers. Trim but informative sentences ground the pages where text appears ("When he was four years old, his father died unexpectedly. The boy wondered, Where did he go?"). Sensitive readers will follow that question into the heart of the story that encompasses Saint-Exupery's childhood, passion for flying, experiences with military and commercial planes, multiple crashes, risk-taking temperament, friendships, marriage, and publications. Dates, places, events, and exploits swirl around smaller images framed cleverly with bubbles, sequential panels, maps, or airplanes. The emotional content comes through the changing colors and compositions of Sis's exquisite double spreads. Many are wordless, as when the pilot stands at the edge of the vast turquoise ocean; above the horizon, twinkling yellow stars form the curls and eyes of the title character of The Little Prince. Sis is as adept at drama (the red paint bleeding from the sky as the Germans bomb France) as he is at subtle humor (an aerial view of Manhattan portrays the city as an alligator-shaped landmass emerging from a sewer). Slyly inserted referents, from an elephant inside a "hat" to a Melies moon, add meaning. Sis's handling of the aviator's last flight and disappearance strikes just the right notes of mystery, majesty, and quiet wonder that connect the life and longings of Saint-Exupery to those of his young, fictional friend. Brilliant bookmaking.-Wendy Lukehart, District of Columbia Public Library (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
