Books: Earth & Air

SAINT-EXUPÉRY (330 pp.) — Marcel Migeo—McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

For grouchy skeptics who asked whether the machine age had given the human race anything except autos and creeping concrete, air conditioning and smog. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had an impassioned answer. Man's great new gift was the earth, seen from the air. "Saint-Ex" despised the age, but accepted its gift with a mystical joy. He reacted to flight as Coleridge did to opium, with occasionally calamitous results, and wrote of the air—in Night Flight, Flight to Arras and Wind, Sand and Stars—better than anyone since.

Saint-Ex was...