New Breed

WIND, SAND AND STARS--Anfolne de Saint Exupery -- Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

In the literature of flying there are few literary books. Among the few: Cecil Lewis' Sagittarius Rising, Anne Lindbergh's North to the Orient, Jimmy Collins' Test Pilot, Antoine de Saint Exupery's Night Flight. Most imaginative of these was Night Flight (1932), the work of a tall, tilt-nosed 39-year-old French airmail flier for whom the air offers a lesson in man's fate.

Even closer partners in his Wind, Sand and Stars are the pilot and the poet, the mechanic and the metaphysician. Says Author Saint Exupery: "One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality. ... It plunges a man directly into the heart of mystery."

Thus is created a "new breed of men," risking death not for businessmen's mailbags but for "the dignity of the craft," a new human fraternity born of shared loneliness, dangers, purpose. Some of the breed:

> Mermoz, surveyor of the Casablanca-Dakar line across the Sahara, the South American line between Buenos Aires and Santiago; veteran of a dozen smashups; who, before he was lost in the South Atlantic, confessed to Saint Exupery: "It's worth it, it's worth the final smashup."

> Guillaumet, airmail pilot on the route surveyed by Mermoz, who, forced down in the Andes, became "the author of his own miracle" in as heroic a trek as any in exploring history. Said Pilot Guillau-met: "I swear that what I went through, no animal would have gone through."

>Author Saint Exupery, who fought his way through a 150-mile cyclone off the Argentine coast; survived a smashup at 175 m.p.h. in the Libyan desert (on his Paris-Saigon flight), was rescued in time's nick after a 350-mile trudge.

Author Saint Exupery's "new breed" of airmen begins to look like an international fraternity. He does not try to account for the local chapters of bombing pilots.

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