Books: Subservience in the Desert

THE WISDOM OF THE SANDS (350 pp.)—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—Harcourt, Brace ($4).

The best writing to be found in the five-inch shelf of flying literature was done by French Airman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight, Wind, Sand and Stars, Flight to Arras). He was that rare 20th Century blend, a courageous man of action whose deepest values were spiritual. On his long airmail flights over desert and ocean, and on military missions over doomed France in 1940, his brooding imagination conceived a vision of life in which God, soul and the brotherhood of man shone...