Two and a half stars, rounded up to three for old-time's sake. I loved it when I was twelve years old, but I was a rather odd child, fond of day-dreaming and lying on the grass watching the clouds for hours on end. I wanted to run away on a tramp steamer and dreamed of learning to fly. That must have been the girl who adored this book; decades later, I find I'm a bit too impatient and busy to be fully immersed in books like this one.Wind, Sand and Stars is a loosely connected series of rambling essays with no plot to speak of. The action is thrilling, with the focus on guts and survival against all odds, but the fragmentary tales are often interrupted with long lyrical passages, or philosophical musings. Some of these digressions work, others seem superfluous and distracting. It is a young man's book and very much the reflection of a particular time and culture--it was that aspect I enjoyed the most this time around.I suspect that the additions in the English version were an attempt to add a little context to these essays and weave them together a bit. The translator of my edition Lewis Galantière captured the feeling of the French version of Wind, Sand and Stars than Stuart Gilbert did with Night Flight.
