To a child, The Little Prince is the story of a boy who falls from the sky, meets lots of funny people on his travels, and then returns to his star. But take a closer look and you find as clear a commentary on everything that's wrong with modern life—and what can be done to fix it—as you would in the most biting social satire.

Think back on those planets the boy visits on his trip to earth. Each inhabitant offers a profound lesson on how easily we can go wrong in our life choices. There's the red-faced gentleman, who has "never smelled a flower...looked at a star... [or] loved anyone." Why? He's been too busy telling everyone that he's a serious man--and acting the part. For, as we learn later on, he is a businessman. A businessman whose business is counting the stars, so that he might own them—but so preoccupied is he with the counting that he forgets to enjoy his wealth. (Witness this exchange: "And what use is it to you to own the stars?" "It makes me rich." "And what is the point of being rich?" "It enables me to buy other stars." The little prince is quick to note the circular reasoning. The man himself, not so much.)

There's the lamplighter, whose job seems at first to be useful, until the prince realizes that it's nothing but mindless routine. The lamplighter has no initiative, no perspective on his work or on how it can be made more efficient or effective. Instead, he blindly follows tradition. His answer to every question is the same: "Those are the orders."

There's the geographer who doesn't explore, doesn't leave his desk, doesn't have time for such nonsense as seeing what surrounds his immediate vicinity or recording such ephemeral things as flowers. What's the point of being a geographer, wonders the prince, if you know nothing about your own planet?

There's the poignant drunkard, who drinks, "In order to forget." To forget what? the little prince wants to know. "To forget that I am ashamed," responds the drunkard. And of what, exactly? "Ashamed of drinking," is the reply. A logic that may sound all too familiar in the world outside the little prince's.

In that crowd, the subjectless king seems the least absurd of all. At the very least, he knows the limits of his authority. "If I were to order a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragedy, or to change himself into a sea-bird," he asks the little prince, "and if the general did not carry out the order, which one of us would be at fault?" A line of thinking many a real-life king would do well to adopt. And it is the king, too, who utters that hard-to-swallow truth: "It is far more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others." A lesson all too many adults have trouble learning, no matter how many times it rears its unsightly head.