Word: saints
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Saint-Exupery, by Marcel Migeo. The flamboyant French airman who wrote Wind, Sand and Stars and The Little Prince is worth reading about in this biography by an old flying comrade, even though the book is flawed by grandiloquence...
...Saint-Ex was born in 1900, and so was too young for combat flying during World War I. It was the only omission of a flamboyant career, and the flyer made up for it by his death in 1944, when, overage and stiff from crash wounds, he disappeared over the Mediterranean at the controls of a U.S. reconnaissance plane. The legend he left is a rare compound of literary brilliance and high gallantry; no biographer, including the present one, has been wholly successful in dealing with...
Perilous Release. Author Migeo's reaction to the legend is an irritating grandiloquence and an equally bothersome coyness about his subject's personal life. Saint-Ex's mistress, for instance, is chivalrously called "Madame X," and her long and intense affair with him is left vague. Still, the biography has its value; the author, a pilot himself, knew Saint-Ex when they were both in flying school. Although, with typical exuberance, he calls his subject "a genius among the great men of his era," he is no hero-worshiper where Saint-Ex's flying is concerned...
...tall, shambling French aristocrat was a good pilot, in Migeo's estimation, but not a great one, despite great skill and daring. Saint-Ex's grievous flaw, one that involved him in a dozen crashes and near-crashes, was his absentmindedness. He flew for release, if not escape, and once released, his thoughts did not linger on altimeter or compass. His magnificent Flight to Arras is as much a meditation as it is the log of a dangerous reconnaissance mission into German-occupied French territory. With German fighters closing in, the aviator muses for paragraphs about the country...
Wild Chances. As a boy in Burgundy, Antoine was a loving, charming bully to his widowed mother and the rest of the Saint-Exupery children, but only acute hindsight could find anything extraordinary in the child. Even flying did not capture him immediately. He learned to pilot a plane to while away his period of army service, liked it despite a training crash that cracked his skull. For three years after he was demobilized. Saint-Ex clerked for a tile firm...